The Dead Guy's Phone Booth
by Akktri
Summary: A little speculation about what it would be like in the DW world without a know-it-all time lord, and an idiot running the TARDIS. I dare BBC to film this.
1. Chapter 1: The Phone Booth

I first saw the blue box outside the bathroom window of my basement level studio apartment.

I was taking a shower, and I glimpsed something blue through a crack in the Venetian blinds. I cracked a couple slats open and saw the corner of the thing behind a concrete partition.

Figuring it was some tool chest or utility box left behind by the landscaping crew, I washed my hair and continued my morning ritual of eating breakfast, getting dressed for work, packing my lunch and work supplies.

However, when I got in my car and stared over the rock wall outside the unit, I suddenly noticed that it wasn't a tool box at all, but rather something like a tall blue shed or a phone booth. And as I'm staring at this thing, the doors suddenly swing inwards, and I see a man spilling onto the dirt.

Although I generally avoid helping strange freakish people in unusual situations telling of their deranged psychological state, I decided it my moral obligation to at least climb over the wall and call for an ambulance, or, in case of crazy, check if one is necessary.

The guy was well dressed. He had on slacks, a button up shirt, a vest, and a bow tie, something that nobody at my complex ever wore. He looked like an older guy, and his hair was unkempt. He had fallen on his face, but now lay on his back. He didn't look like he was breathing.

I checked his pulse and found none. I also put my head to his chest to see if he had any air going at all. Nothing. I knew first aid, but there wasn't much I could do with this. I called 9-11, telling them the address and location of the body, and as I'm waiting for the ambulance, I start staring into the "shed."

At first, it doesn't compute. The shed is only a certain width, but I can see a huge room inside.

So naturally I step through the opening.

The room inside was white, and it had walls covered in circular panels looking like inverted Frisbees. In the center I saw a six sided device that reminded me of arcade machines. One side was sort of like Tron, with a glowing monitor, a crazy joystick and a track ball. Another side had a red lever, a Vic-20 style keyboard, and a set of buttons configured like a Sega Saturn control. It all looked silly, like the man had some kind of mobile arcade, so I pulled the red lever and pushed a few buttons.

The door closed, the place made a lot of grinding sounds, but I thought it part of the entertainment. Arcades are always loud and noisy. I gave the controls a serious whirl, attempting to start a game on one of the many monitors, but my attempts resulted in a lot of confusing screens, and I came to the conclusion I was playing one of those flight simulation things that you need to read a three thousand page manual to figure out. And so I gave it up, deciding to explore the rest of the "building".

I wandered down a hallway, turned a corner, then got lost in a maze of identical looking white hallways. I found a library that, strangely enough, had a swimming pool at the bottom. There was a bowling alley, billiards, and a chemistry lab.

At the end of a hallway, I came across a door with a vaguely triangular shape, which slid open automatically like a supermarket entrance when I rested my hand on a square of metal next to it. Inside I found a sort of warehouse, filled to near bursting with a number of weird expensive looking objects. Half of them looked like the kind of things you'd see in a Voodoo shop on the French Quarter, like those banana headed wooden god sculptures from the Republic of Benin, black candles and a human skull with horns growing from the cranium. But there were shiny toys scattered among them, things that looked like tricorders from Star Trek, and a Seurat that couldn't possibly be anything other than a forgery, so I decided they were all movie props and played with them.

I had ceased to wonder why this big thing existed inside a tiny little phone booth, having rationalized it as being a sort of funhouse where mirrors reflect a basement and the floor drops you downstairs to a bigger room. Of course it didn't make sense because I'd been in that apartment for more than a year, and I would have noticed a trapdoor on the grass, especially one leading to an unknown location below a basement studio, but it was the only putty I could stick in the gap. To the best of my knowledge, things like alternate dimensions and time travel only existed on TV, and it wasn't the kind of thing that happened to you in real life. This is why I picked up a fancy looking silver egg covered in buttons and flashing lights, playfully pressing whatever item interested my finger.

The thing let out a steady beeping noise, like it were counting down to something, and I laughed as I imagined this fake alien hand grenade being tossed by an actor in a rubber suit. As the beeping got angrier, counting down to one, I just smiled and rolled it in my hands, turning it over to look for the manufacturer's stamp.

A moment later, it let out a series of animal sounds and exploded.

I suddenly found myself coated from head to foot with a greasy viscous fluid the same color and consistency of old petroleum jelly, a clingy brown-yellow ooze that reeked of spoiled tuna. The stuff had gotten into every crevice of my clothes, and into my eyes, so I was temporarily blinded for several minutes, staggering and stumbling around through unfamiliar bric-a-brac in a frantic search for the pool, or any sort of water bearing receptacle. My hands found a scarf, which I ruined thoroughly as I blinked several times in attempts to clear my burning eyes.

I felt around the edges of a round thing, like a kind of antique heater unit with a knob on one end and lightbulbs up top, then a suitcase that I was sure to find first aid supplies inside.

I was wrong. The thing held nothing but weird socket wrenches with light bulbs on them. Determined to find the pool, I zombie shuffled further, knocking over something that looked like a cel phone to my watery eyes.

Immediately, I heard a voice speaking to...someone, and I could tell it was a recording. The voice was British, sounding like a very stern and serious version of the GEICO reptile.

"I am the Doctor," he said. "If you're listening to this, it means I have died."

Doctor? I thought. Of what? I didn't get an answer.

"Martha," the voice continued. "Time lords aren't always open in sharing their affection. Although we're not of the same species, I still...have these feelings for you. Had, actually. Past tense. No, no. That's not what I meant. It's past tense because I'm dead."

I heard him mutter something about redoing the tape. "If things had been different, I imagine I would have even taken you to see Jay Z, Ice T, and whatever other letters of the alphabet you kept going on about. But never mind that now. Martha, I love you. Remember that. I always love you." He paused at this point, and I could hear him swallow. "Maybe not always, since I've lived hundreds of years before you were born, but-"

My eyes were burning, and I couldn't take any more of this guy's blundering, so I stumbled on, knocking over a metal box, one which also had a recording of a British guy, this one a plodding, lilting voice with very little vocal variety.

"I am the Doctor," he said. "Sarah..."

Feeling like I were in a toy store after a bratty child had squeezed all the sound and music toys, I quickly staggered on, kicking over another device.

When I saw the man, I nearly had a heart attack.

It was some crazy guy with a big Jay Leno chin and a bow tie. "I am the Doctor," he said, launching into another farewell speech. I thought he'd jump me, or at least acknowledge my existence or tell me to get lost, but he just kept on talking, so I figured him to be a sort of theme park automoton and went on with my stumbling.

Great, I was thinking. I'm in the middle of the convention for doctors who are about to die.

The stuff...whatever it was, filled my nostrils and gave me headaches. The whole room seemed to tilt beneath my feet.

Somehow I found the door again, and I was groping my way down the bubbles along the hallway beyond.

I don't know how many rooms I stumbled through with bleary eyes, knocking over queer artifacts and wiping slime on anything that resembled a towel. I crossed an intersection, then a T-joint, then my eyes beheld something that nearly sent my heart into an arrythmia again.

It was a man in a dark suit, and he had a squid for a head.

The thing, whatever it was, had these huge baleful eyes, and it seemed to glare at me as the giant spaghetti noodles it had for a face quivered and squirmed independently of one another.

The guy or thing had a sort of glowing ball in its hand, and it was pointing it at me.

For several seconds I stared at it, and it stared at me, tilting its head in puzzlement, neither of us saying a word.

Since it didn't make any move to communicate, I assumed it to be another funhouse automoton. "And me without a fork," I joked.

A blob of smelly junk rolled across my bloodshot eyes, and when I blinked, the thing was gone.

Eventually I found the library pool, and fell, rather than dove into it. Being a vaguely petroleum based product, the stuff of course did not come out easily, but at last my eyes were clearing.

I swam around in the water for quite some time, rubbing my eyes and trying to shake the stuff off, but I soon gave up and climbed out, trailing water everywhere as I wandered the halls, attempting to locate the entrance of the wretched place.

At long last I did, and after a few minutes of poking and fumbling, I found the door lever, and that's when things got a whole hell of a lot worse.

The very instant the doors swung open, a big green thing the size of a giant Great Dane knocked me against the "arcade machines", and a mouth of razor sharp teeth was breathing its hot smelly breath in my face.

The thing sniffs, shrieks at me, then tackles me against the wall, and I see five others stomping in, sniffing around, growling. I get thrown against something else, and everything goes dark.


	2. Chapter 2: Caveman Head

I awoke to the sensation of rocks scraping my back and my hair being pulled out by the roots. My shirt was a bloody shredded rag, my skin cut and bleeding, as my body bumped along the dirt in some insect infested jungle. Soil entered these wounds like burning salt. In my groggy, half conscious state, I wondered if something like this had killed the "Doctor", but then I remembered his clothing had been intact.  
My captor, whoever or whatever it was, had on an ouftit that looked like a rug from a hunting lodge, and out of the corners of my bleary eyes I could see narrow limbs with deeply tanned skin. The legs were lean and hairy, like that of a young man. This individual lost their grip, and I found rough hands grabbing hold of my shirt and belt, dragging me through a thicket.  
I thought I caught a glimpse of a figure in a gray suit with a glowing orb standing off in the woods, but I assumed it was due to a concussion.  
At this point, I faded out of consciousness.  
I snapped awake when I felt someone undoing my belt and playing with my pants.  
The first thing my eyes beheld was a dirty female face with a mess of tangled matted hair and crooked teeth. I screamed.  
My scream caused her to scream, and we screamed at each other until she scuttled ass backwards on the sandy beach I was laying on.  
My skin felt like it were on fire. Someone, presumably the woman, had cleaned out my cuts and filled them with some sort of slimy glop that tingled and burned in the wounds.  
We stared at each other in silence, her in her brown rug, me with no shirt and my fly hanging wide open.  
Quickly, I zipped up, which caused her to jump back. Then she started crawling up to me on all fours, slowly, but with a determined boldness that indicated she wasn't threatened. Her breasts dangled loose beneath the ill fitting rug, her outfit revealing more than it concealed.  
"Hi,"I stammered, waving a hand.  
After jumping back a bit, she edged closer, repeating the sound as she mirrored my wave.  
I glanced down at the ugly clotting cuts across my chest. "What happened?"  
The woman didn't understand. She just mirrored me, even when I repeated the question, so I just sighed and gave up, wondering when she was going to start pulling my hair again.  
"I'm Robert," I said.  
"Rob-ert," she pronounced carefully.  
"What's your name?"  
She just repeated the sound and added a few nonsense syllables for good measure. I shook my head and she sighed.  
I was still under the impression I was in an amusement park, despite seeing the sun shining brightly on a beach that shouldn't exist within a twenty mile radius of my apartment, so I didn't do the Me Tarzan You Jane routine. At least, not at first. At the moment, it was still Blue Box Theme Park.  
"Seriously, where am I? What is this place?"  
She gave me a blank stare.  
At this point I sighed and gave up, staring at her as she crawled closer and closer.  
She knelt by my feet, pounding her chest. "Eev. Eev." She then pointed at my chest expectantly.  
Eev? I thought. Like the Rod Sterling story? I think if I had never seen that program, things would have happened a lot differently.  
When I didn't reply, she pounded her chest again.  
"Robert." I sighed. "Robert Wilson."  
Then she giggled, pointed to herself, then to me, calling me Robewerson and herself Eev.  
The next thing I knew, she was sitting on my lap, unbuckling my belt again.  
I pushed her hands away, but she only shoved me flat on the sand, teasing the belt out of its loops.  
I was still groggy from being torn up by that reptile and being dragged through the jungle by my hair didn't help. I felt really tired, and although I vaguely remembered being fed some kind of plant juice, my arms still felt like lead, though the sensation was fading minute by minute.  
I watched helplessly as she threw my belt in the sand, then amused herself by pulling my zipper up and down. The top button came unfastened, and soon I found my jeans being tossed into a pile of brush.  
After that, she starts playing with the elastic on my cotton briefs, and, well, my body reacted like a normal male would in that situation. Sure, she needed a shampoo and a dentist, and maybe some Nair for those legs, but otherwise she wasn't that bad looking.  
I was still sort of out of it, my head ached, and I wasn't entirely sure which way was up at the moment. I guess if I'm truly honest with myself, I knew enough to tell her to stop trying to pull my Johnson through the Y-front, but I let her do it, and then the briefs came off.  
Shortly afterwards, she was on top of me, and I was busily familiarizing myself with the inner contents of the crudely fashioned rags she called clothing.  
The Twilight Zone in question involved an astronaut crash landing on an alien planet, and meeting a woman named `Eev'. They get to know each other, and fall in love, presumably populating the entire planet. The astronaut's name was Adam. With this thought running through my head, I thought our little meeting was fated from the beginning of time. The part of me that disagreed wasn't disagreeing very loudly, and it definitely wasn't the one exploring the woman's curvature. And so I let her do with me what she willed.  
Her kisses, being as foul as one can imagine from someone blissfully unaware of the existence of toothbrushes, were an instant turn off. I hadn't noticed it while she had been doing the `seated row', but when she leaned closer, I got the impression that she liked to go dumpster diving for her daily meals.  
After the first couple Frenches, I pushed her away, stuck out my tongue, and went bleah.  
She responded by slapping me hard across the face, then giving me a crooked smile.  
As I gazed into those eyes, I instantly felt shame at being so petty and sorry I hurt her feelings. I shrugged and gave her a kiss, and we went back to what we were doing. My first thought was, if all women were like this, there would be no gay people. She had the best traits of both sexes, and assaulted you if you dared to call her icky.  
Ironically, the lyrics to a novelty song about cavemen kept popping in my head.  
Make love on a dinosaur  
Makes you happy but it makes you sore  
No deodorant, no tooth paste  
Funny kisses, funny taste...  
And as she grunted on top of me, the thought just wouldn't go away.  
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a figure in gray slacks, the same scary tentacle faced creature that had waved a glowing orb at me as I wandered the outer hallways of the blue box. I'm not wild about people who like to watch, so I raised my arm to wave the pervert away, but he was already gone.  
A loud shriek interrupted our coitus, and I found myself being dragged half a mile down the shoreline of...wherever I was.  
In the distance, I saw the green things approaching.  
The woman looked back and forth at the trees, then suddenly shoved me into water.  
What followed seemed like a lot of horseplay to me. First, she was shoving and dragging me further and further out. She grabbed and pulled at my ankles, a couple times nearly drowning me as I flailed around in dark waters where I couldn't even touch the bottom.  
The roaring and splashing behind me brought it all into focus. The green things didn't appear to know how to swim.  
As we paddled out to deeper and deeper water, the things flailed helplessly and drowned while the others backed away, skirting the shore with watchful wariness.  
We both knew it was foolhardy to return to the beach, even a mile from the site, for the things would surely find us and we were both tiring.  
On a distant rock, swamped by crashing waves, I could see a tiny figure in a gray suit holding a light. As I swallowed water and found myself struggling to stay afloat, the thought occurred to me that the things were angels of some sort, perhaps the angels of death. Not a comforting thought.  
For a moment, I thought I would surely drown and find out for sure, but Eve barked something, waving at a rocky outcrop at the side of a mountain, and I followed her into a shallow little cave accessible only by the water.  
Here I found a primitive sort of campsite, a dying fire in a slowly smouldering pile of logs, some barbaric looking knives made of flint, and a woven mat covered in a pile of skins.  
I should have thought it odd that the place looked lived in, but I figured she was a female Robinson Crusoe, and so I blindly followed her to the skins, and we went all the way.  
In addition to the doggy breath, the woman was loud, and it echoed all over the cave. I wouldn't have cared one bit, but when we had reached the point of no return, I suddenly noticed that the cave wasn't empty.  
The moment the woman had collapsed sated on my chest, I glanced above her head and saw a huge man stomping up to us.  
He had arms as thick as tree limbs, and a bushy beard thick and full as the skins he wrapped his body with.  
Without a word, he shoved the woman off me and pulled me to my feet by my hair, screaming in my face.


	3. Chapter 3: The Tribe

More bizarre happenings, thanks to the TARDIS and a dead Doctor...

* * *

So there I was, standing on my tiptoes, bare assed naked as some hairy caveman guy clenched my hair in his fist and yelled complete gibberish in my face with his stinky caveman breath.

I didn't know if these people were actually cavemen, since I still wasn't one hundred percent certain where I was, but the guy made me think of the psycho ex boyfriend of a teenaged Flintstones character, so I assumed he was a caveman. Whether or not I was still inside the blue box, this was no funhouse robot, and neither was the woman I probably shouldn't have slept with.

I know my science, so I know that dinosaurs don't exist in the same layer of rock that man did, but this man was by definition a man in a cave.

Anyways, back to the hair pulling. For roughly five minutes, this guy did nothing but growl and blurt nonsense syllables, coating my face with spittle, and I didn't know whether to smile, nod or fart. I put on my most apologetic face, and would have peed all over the place had I not just completed sexual intercourse.

At last he gave up, hurling me against the cave wall.

After he'd punched and backhanded me a couple times, the woman stepped in the way, and the two started arguing.

All this time, I thought the giant man was her boyfriend, but as I read the awkward body language, it became clear their argument was more along the lines of "No, daddy, don't hurt him, he's my boyfriend."

The big man was trying to convince her that I was wrong for her, and he was probably right. She, on the other hand, seemed to think I was the world's greatest gift to women.

He took her aside in sort of a concerned fatherly manner, massive arm wrapped around her shoulder, and I heard the two muttering to each other, the father sort of resignedly giving her up to her wild notions (whatever they were), the girl thanking him for being so understanding, and then he slaps her naked butt and I see the guy towering over me again.

Out of his mouth comes this unbelievable spew of gibberish like I've never heard before, and then he's hugging me and pounding me on the back, practically crushing my rib cage in the process.

I flashed him a grin, but he seemed shocked at my semi flawless dental hygiene, so I quickly closed my mouth again. I was relieved when he let go.

Embarrassed at my nudity, I snatched up one of the skins I had sex upon and wrapped it around myself like a towel. A big fat hairy towel that refused to stay put. I kept one hand ever poised in the event of it falling off. My woman (I guess I can call her that because I slept with her) had something better laying on a rock shelf, another one of those stitched together rags like the one I'd been sticking my hands beneath. She didn't have a spare for me, but she did oblige me with a piece of bone to hold my "towel" together. Sadly, it still tended to creep down my narrow ass.

The moment we were dressed (and I use the term loosely), the big man was leading us down a narrow tunnel, through a cavern, and up a rough hewn stairwell set in the rock.

Since the stairway went on for some time in the dark, I began pondering my situation, and what I had just done.

If the blue phone booth had actually sent me back in time, and I had just slept with a real cavewoman, whose family tree did I mess up? My own? Am I really my own grandpa? Or did I ensure that myself, The Queen, and Henry Ford all had the same bloodline? I didn't have an answer for that. I was still hoping against hope that I'd somehow been transported to the Amazon, and there just happened to be giant carnivorous lizards there.

A few kilometers later, the cave opened up, and I began to see rows of green cubes along the boulders, grass huts with thatched roofs, with half naked people going about their ordinary stone age business like I'd seen in National Geographic illustrations.

They cured and cooked stuff over fires, they made spears and dug holes, and the women were busy revolutionizing the fashion industry with their pitiful sewing.

Unsurprisingly, the children ran around naked, or wore nasty looking vine g-strings like some of the adults. If I had been wearing pants or underwear, I would have stared indiscriminately at these people, remarking how barbaric and simple they all were (not to mention unlawful!), but I myself was half naked, and had just deflowered someone's daughter, so I was the furthest thing from a detached observer.

I felt all their eyes on me as I passed, and in their faces I detected a whole range of emotions. To some I must have appeared the devil incarnate, for they stared at me with looks of fear and dread, attempting to wave the white demon away with the sign of the evil eye.

Others seemed to be awed by the pale white god, and had to be dissuaded from throwing themselves at my feet with their faces to the ground.

The smarter, calmer ones, I hoped, were correctly assuming I was just an odd looking stranger from a different tribe.

After meeting a few of their stares, I got embarrassed and stared at the ground and my girlfriend's derriere instead.

How did I get here? I again wondered. What was that blue shed thing I walked into? Am I still in the blue...whatever? Did someone put me in a helicopter and drop me in the Amazon when I was unconscious? And what were those green things? Were they really dinosaurs? And why didn't my girlfriend wear a vine g-string? What does that say about her as a woman? What did she see in me? Was she really that desperate? Was she damaged goods? And isn't it supposed to be the caveman that knocks the cavewoman out and drags her by the hair to the sleeping quarters? Did anthropologists have it wrong, or is she just weird?

None of these things had an answer, and I was turning over a few more baffling mysteries when we arrived at a large hut decorated from top to bottom with animal bones and arcane symbols.

A moment later, we were inside, standing in front of some shaman-esque person behind a sweltering fire pit. The guy had on a cow skull for a hat, feathers, and a bone necklace.

He wasn't the friendliest person in the world. His eyes got real big in his primitive grease paint when he saw me, but then he put on a show of being Oz the All Knowing.

After blowing smoke everywhere with a stone pipe, he spit, pissed, and bled on a hammered copper plate, then hung it over the fire and thew bones on it, pretending to read them. He then had a very serious discussion with Eve's dad.

A moment later, he was blowing a...animal horn, and we were standing out back in sort of a miniature Stonehenge, watching people lighting up a huge bonfire.

A huge crowd soon gathered around us, and the bonfire rivaled that of the one at Texas A&M that killed all those people.

I really didn't want to look back at the staring savages. I was pretty sure they were all family members and friends of the woman. As my mind processed that, I suddenly realized I had to care about a whole lot of people I really didn't want to know.

I focused my eyes on the circle of huts surrounding the fire pit.

Suddenly someone pulled off my bear skin and threw a feathered cape around my shoulders, doing the same for my partner. Eve squeezed my hand, but I felt like I was in one of those naked in public dreams.

Following this, the shaman threw chicken blood on everyone, including us, and he started blabbering about something and singing like a plains Indian.

Judging by the amount of times the girl squeezed my hand, and the way everything seemed to be centering on us, I could tell it had something to do with marriage. Since I had presumably stolen this woman's virginity (if she had someone before me, she wasn't telling) I was okay with it. Time traveler or not, I wasn't going to leave the mother of my illegitimate child to fend for herself in a shoddy dirt pile.

That being said, if I knew what came next, I would have ran away the moment I entered the village.

The guy had a mystical stick with smooth stones lashed to it, and this stick was in the fire. When he pulled it out, it looked like a torch, and he was carrying it right up to my naked chest.

I tried to escape, but Eve's dad grabbed my neck, and the scalding thing scorched me right above the nipple. I screamed like a girl, and everyone laughed at me. Then Eve got the marking.

And I thought coughing up a grand for a diamond was torture! I'd take that over scarification any day.

When I had calmed down and let the initiation scar burn itself cool, I noticed I was surrounded by quite a few married people. Before, it just seemed like a lot of tribal scarring, but now it made perfect sense.

After the traditional kiss, people were forcing wretched tasting liquids down our throats and slapping us on our feathered backs as they mouthed congratulations in their ridiculous language.

A feast then commenced, in which I ate quantities of undercooked bloody birds, one of which suspiciously resembled dodo, some gritty bread with teeth shattering chaff still in it, and corn. Lots and lots of corn.

I'm pretty sure maize and dodo birds didn't exist in the same region, but I figured Indians and cavemen could make boats.

The merriment, the feast and the one sided conversations were all very well and good, and I would have been content to take my new bride to the honeymoon hut, but at the precise moment I had picked up my second horn of demon brew, I heard this loud grinding sound and the blue box suddenly popped into existence behind the shaman's hut, scattering the crowd like a pissed off witch in Munchkinland.

My first thought was, wow, I didn't know it could do that.

As everyone around me trembled, cast the evil eye, or bowed before the thing, I suddenly became aware of two things: One, the doors were wide open, and two, a steady stream of olive colored saw toothed reptiles was pouring out.


	4. Chapter 4: Massacre

I had just witnessed a blue phone booth loaded with dinosaurs appear out of thin air. The primitive village where I had just gotten married fell into chaos, people running every which way as they either attempted to flee or stab the creatures with spears.  
In the space of a minute, ten people ended up either getting disemboweled or clawed to death. And there I was, naked as a jaybird save for the brightly colored marriage cape made of parrot feathers tied around my neck.  
The mighty men of the village retaliated with their flint axes and other crude implements, their efforts yielding varying degrees of success. Torches worked better, but the torch bearers got tackled from behind, and we were hopelessly outnumbered.  
To be honest, I should have let my wife die with everyone else, or at least fled under the cover of anarchy. If I truly had traveled back in time, her existence, her carrying my seed, would probably cause a temporal paradox or make me my own grandpa, and if she died, I also wouldn't have to be tied down to a village that doesn't understand the concept of dentistry or underwear. It would have solved a lot of problems, temporally and morally, but I had made a commitment, so I grabbed a torch in one hand, Mrs. Wilson in the other, preparing to fight to the death. My breathing became shallow as I turned my head this way and that in search of would-be foes, and as I felt the cape brushing against my naked thighs, I hoped and prayed these things didn't like sausage.  
Suddenly I got a bright idea. Everyone was running away from the box, including the lizards. Why not run towards it? I tapped Eve Wilson's shoulder (more like beat against her cape), pointing to it.  
She said no.  
I pointed again, and she basically told me hell no, so I pulled her in that direction.  
Unfortunately, she hunted bison or something equally tough and muscular all day, and I spent ninety percent of my time in front of a computer, so she pulled me in the opposite direction as easily as a spooked German shepherd can drag a small child down a block and back.  
For several tense seconds, we played tug of war, me fighting uselessly for purchase, Eve dragging me further and further from my goal. The torch fell to the ground and puffed out.  
I could see it. An open lane between the far huts and the boulders. I pointed that way and she didn't get it.  
In desperation, I let go, and she fell to the ground, her cape molting all over the place.  
Aiming to lead by example, I dashed behind a far tent, waving urgently to her.  
She caught up to me with little effort, and then a shapely fist hits me in the face.  
As I'm seeing stars, she starts dragging me by the hair, so I pull a leg out from under her, threw dirt in her face, and ran further in the direction of the box.  
I decided, once I got in the box, I'd barricade myself in there, and watch for Eve through the windows, or the door if I wasn't able to find any windows. Being of the stronger sex, at least in our relationship, I firmly believed she would be able to follow my lead.  
For the most part, the things were too busy disemboweling and eating people to bother with me, even with my beautiful feathered cape. But as I passed the fourth hut along the way to the phone booth, I noticed a green thing jump at me from the shadows, its disemboweling toe claw aimed and ready to cut me open.  
I closed my eyes, waiting for it to happen, but at the last moment, I heard a banshee-like scream and I open my eyes to see my wife ramming a flint knife through the beast's skull.  
When the thing fell to the ground, dead, she grunted and pointed back the way we came. Fool, don't go any closer to that demon box.  
I crossed my arms, shaking my head.  
For a moment, I thought she was going to knock me out again, but instaed she starts crying, running a finger down her scarification. I'm your wife.  
I nodded, touching my own scar solemnly. Then I put an arm around her cape, pointing to the box, then gestured, caveman style, you-me-together.  
She pointed back at the mini Stonehenge we had just left, clutching her chest like she were hugging someone. Family, it meant.  
I nodded, but pointed to the box, making a show of shielding a fist with my other hand.  
She shook her head fiercely.  
I nodded yes.  
She shook her head no. Her eyes said `How do you know?'  
I flexed my arm and she laughed. You are not mighty. But still I pointed that way.  
She sighed in resignation, tapping her scar. With a nod, she crept, ninja style, around the rear of the next hut.  
As we neared the box, the creatures became less and less, apparently wanting no more to do with the thing than a cat wants to play with a rocking chair.  
When I turned the corner, I felt a heavy hand clamp down on my neck. When I looked back, I saw the scowling face of my father-in-law, Mr. Oog, or whatever it was.  
Don't worry, sir. I'll take good care of your daughter, I mimed.  
The man was badly cut. I looked on the ground and saw a trail of dead lizards behind him. All this time I thought I was invisible to those things, but I really wasn't. I blamed it on my stupid parrot cape that I stupidly hadn't thrown off.  
I sighed and jabbed a finger in the direction of the blue box.  
The man shook his head, but Eve pleaded my case, causing him to relent.  
Soon our little hunting party neared the box, taking down two straggling creatures with the tools left behind by dead villagers.  
I hurriedly pressed my body up to the side of the box, peering around the corner.  
We grabbed some more tools off the ground, then crept around the splintery blue edge, to the place where all the things had been spewing out.  
At first, it appeared as if the coast was clear. I could see the arcade machine thing and the floor, and I couldn't see a reptile anywhere. But when my bare foot crossed the threshold, a pair of them jumped out from behind the machine, and I was tackled against a wall.  
I don't know why I wasn't disemboweled, but before it could try, Mr. Oog stabbed it in the neck, right below the jaw.  
The creature tried a few feeble chomps at my face, then collapsed on me, blood pouring down my naked chest, oozing into my lap. It reminded me of my first meeting with Eve in ways words can't explain.  
Hearing a secondary scuffle involving the woman, I pushed the thing off, and found her already victorious, the green carcass pooling blood on the floor.  
I still didn't know the first thing about how to make the box do things or go places, but I did know how to close the door. After all, all my troubles had stemmed from opening it in the first place. Seeing that we were relatively safe, with no dinosaurs to be seen, I pulled the lever, breathing a sigh of relief. However, my guests panicked, behaving like trapped rats, shouting and jabbering in their strange language.  
I leaned against the wall, catching my breath, and Mr. Oog had a good look at the console, cautiously flicking the door lever back and forth like a toddler discovering what a light switch was.  
Somehow he got the notion in his savage brain to bait another beast in, closing the door on its neck like a guillotine. It shouldn't have worked, but he forced the door somehow, and a bloody green head came rolling down the floor.  
For a moment, the man turned his back to the console, opening his mouth in attempts to ask me questions, but then his eyes bulged open in surprise as his intestines came spilling out on the floor.  
Apparently we had missed one.


	5. Chapter 5: The Corpse

It used to be a pristine spaceship/phone booth thing, but now blood and bodies covered the floor. Somehow a green dinosaur creature had jumped up and cleared the arcade machine thing in the center of the main room, ripping through my father in law's guts with its toe claws in one quick bloody movement.  
I staggered backwards, knocking over an umbrella stand, and it was on me, smashing me to the floor.  
As I lay there, breathing in its rotten breath, I heard and felt the entire room shaking and grinding like an engine caught between gears, but there was nothing I could do about it.  
My attacker scarcely noticed. It only sniffed, made a thrust at me with its pelvis, then licked me.  
All of a sudden, I knew why I had never been disemboweled. The things had smelled a female, and my abuse only resulted from them discovering I wasn't. Even after my swim, the Vasolene-like tuna fish smelling stuff still clung to me.  
The particular beasty that had me pinned to the floor, after discovering I possessed entirely the wrong genital configuration, decided I might be good to eat, but I knew that was coming, so I grabbed an umbrella, one with a red question mark shaped handle, and shoved it as far back in its mouth as it could reach without the thing taking off my hand.  
A button press released the catch, and then it was choking on it, eyes bulging as it frantically struggled for air.  
I knew it wouldn't last long, so I grabbed a second umbrella and stabbed it in the eye so it couldn't tear me up, then all of a sudden I see a female hand shoving a pair of scissors into its skull.  
She kicked the creature aside, stabbing it again and again and again, then slumped against the machine and wept.  
I tried to hold her, but she punched me in the face, yelling gibberish at me. I killed her father and all of that, I figured.  
Since we were safe, I decided to do some house cleaning. It wasn't to be tidy. I knew I'd have to mess with the arcade machine thing at some point to get home, and I didn't want to keep stepping over bodies and smelling them rot.  
I opened the doors in attempts to throw out the bloody severed dinosaur head, but then I discovered we had moved, and I was now looking over a vast desert that appeared to go on for miles and miles.  
Knowing this thing was prone to bizarre and improbable happenings, I just shrugged and threw the head into the sand.  
At the sight of the desert, my woman let out a horrified shriek, curling up in a fetal position in the furthermost corner of the room. I quickly shut the door, and we stared at each other with eyes full of questions, neither one saying a word, because those couldn't be understood anyway.  
I stepped towards her to give her a reassuring hug, but she backed away like I were some dead thing.  
I touched my scar and she covered hers up and shook her head, and I tripped and fell over a dinosaur carcass.  
When I got up, she retreated to her corner and started weeping, so I gave up, returning to cleaning detail. She hadn't removed her feathered cape, so I figured the divorce wasn't official.  
My own cape had fallen off in the scuffle, but I had no good reason to put it back on, so I just left it there.  
The other bodies were heavy, and I slipped on blood when I tried to push them to the door, so I gave up and looked for the pool.  
I found a room that was like a regular costume shop, but I was all bloody, so I didn't put anything on.  
The room next door contained a bed, which made me forget the bath, because the sheets and blankets would make a good shroud for Mr. Oog.  
After I grabbed those, I grabbed one of those scarves that were laying everywhere and wrapped it around my face. The guy wasn't dead that long, but I still thought it a good idea.  
I threw the blankets over Mr. Oog, and tried to roll him up like a burrito, but he was too damn heavy, and when I tried to tuck his intestines back in, I threw up.  
Removing the scarf, I sighed and looked at my wife with a pleading glance, touching my scar.  
She hugged herself and pointed to the corpse of her father.  
I nodded, then hugged myself, showing her he's my father too.  
She cried some more at this, blubbering something, then she was sitting on my lap, crying on my shoulder. This was awkward because I wasn't wearing pants, but the blood, the smells and the corpses took away any mood I might have had.  
I put the scarf back on, motioning for her to help me wrap the body up.  
Then what? she motioned.  
With a shrug, I opened the door, pointing to the sand.  
Family, she mimed.  
I sighed and shrugged again.  
With a nod, she helped me wrap him up, respectfully tucking in the man's entrails without so much as a nauseous belch.  
Once we had our human cocoon, I grabbed one of the lizard corpses by the hindquarters, requesting aid again, but she shook her head, making chopping estures and rubbing her belly.  
I rolled my eyes, but accepted this, as I hadn't found a kitchen in the place yet. I got up and put an arm around her shoulder, waving for us to go down the hallway.  
She jerked away suddenly, slipping out of my clutches as she shook her head.  
With a shrug, then, I went by myself.  
I figured we'd have to find a burying spot eventually, whether inside this strange blue box, or outside it somewhere, but since she wasn't keen on bleaching her father's bones in the sun, we'd have to stick the guy in cold storage for awhile. At present, he didn't smell that bad, so I decided to use the first shower I came across and worry about it later. Yes, I'd only get dirty again, but walking around with caked dinosaur blood on your junk is pretty gross.  
After having to wander around the place so much, once half blind, I grew accustomed tot he convoluted hallways, and soon found my way back to the library with the pool.  
I was not accustomed to what I saw thrashing around in the water.  
I don't know how it got there, or for how long, but I was sure the "why" had something to do with the slime that bomb had coated me with. The creature couldn't swim in twelve feet of water, but it was trying damn hard, and the pool really wasn't big enough to hold it for long.  
Seeing it floundering there, however, gave me an idea.  
At first I thought about dropping books on its head until it lost the battle with the water, but then I got a better idea (or so I thought) and ran up a curving stairwell to a position behind one of the bookshelves.  
Pushing over a bookshelf is harder than it looks, especially if said shelf has obviously withstood a few voyages through...whatever the hell it was we went through. When I tried, it was no use whatsoever.  
In desperation, I picked up the heaviest volumes I could find, encyclopedias, the history of something called Gallifrey (whatever it was), and several volumes of Mogok legal history, hurling at the creature with all my might.  
My plan backfired. As the thing struggled, the hardbacks didn't sink like a stone (except the one on Gallifrey), but rather provided the thng with a flotation device for it to scrabble upon, and the next thing I knew, it was climbing a rail and casting me a murderous glare.  
In two short jumps, it was stomping up the carpet, and I felt its hot foul smelling breath pouring over my naked skin.  
I grabbed the railing, attempting to flee the area by jumping in the pool, but a green shape suddenly darted through the doorway, blocking my escape.  
In a panic, I dove around the corner of the bookshelf, bolting towards the opposite end, away from the dinosaur.  
When I passed a set of encyclopedias, I saw a green head emerge from the corner.  
As I stopped, backing away, I heard something shallowly rasping behind me, and the smells of hot stinky breath wafted into my nostrils.


	6. Chapter 6: Interment

I thought I was dead. Walled in between a pair of heavy unmovable bookshelves, I had a green saw tooth reptile with homicidal tendencies stomping up to me from one direction, and something equally bad creeping up behind me.

Me with no clothes, no weapons, protected by nothing but a feathered cape and the layer of filth that clung stubbornly to my body.

I did the only thing I could think of. I knocked all the books off one of the wider shelves, and threw myself through the opening.

The reptile tried to follow me, but its head got stuck, and its claws punched books at me from the lower shelf.

I registered the sound of stomping off to my left, but it was too late. The creature was already in my face, its mouth of sharp pointy teeth yawning open to bite a piece off me.

I flinched, ready for the inevitable. Was this what killed the Doctor? I wondered. But I realized the man didn't look like the victim of an animal attack. His clothes were still in one piece. I, on the other hand...

When I opened my eyes, I saw a long needle-like piece of metal exploding from the back of its throat.

The point retreated, and I saw rough hands slamming the hilt of a rapier through the creature's skull.

My wife smiled and touched her scarification. I'm still your wife, I'm sure it meant.

Under her cape, she wore two sword belts. Nothing else. One blade she had buried in the creature. The other still hung by her side.

In a hurry to secure the area, I reached for it, but she pushed my hand away, and in one swift movement, she skewered the lizard stuck in the shelves, and it thundered to the floor. I looked over the balcony and saw the third dinosaur laying belly up at the edge of the pool. All clear.

Without further ado, I dove into the pool.

I didn't know the first thing about how the thing got cleaned and refilled, or how any pool was supposed to be cleaned, but I needed a bath, so I dove into water muddied by dinosaur pheromones and whatever salmonella causing bacteria coats the outside of a dinosaur's body.

My woman joined me, and we swam ourselves clean, leaving blood and who knows what else floating in the water.

I flopped exhausted over the side, staring at the carpet until I felt Mrs. Wilson wrapping her body around me. I gave her an apologetic smile, and then we made out for awhile until we heard shuffling on the carpet near the bookshelves.

For a moment, we stared in shocked silence as the reptile crawled its way past the end of the bookshelves, ducking our heads down like commandos in a Vietnam movie, but then it just looked at us, with that rapier stuck hilt deep through its skull, and it flopped down dead, staring at us with lifeless glassy eyes.

That killed the mood for us, and we got out.

I was still thinking in caveman mode, so I dried myself off on a blanket from another bed inside the...spaceship.

Once that had been taken care of, I took advantage of the costume shop, picking out the first set of clothes that caught my eye.

This "Doctor" person wasn't too keen on denim, so I picked out a pair of khakis and a flowery Hawaiian shirt. I looked for briefs, but it became apparent that our "MD" liked everything with lots of room on the inside, so I resigned myself to a pair of black boxers.

The guy had little feet, but I found some flip flops that seemed adequate for my purposes.

Eve had been watching me the whole time, but she'd seen everything there is to see already, so I didn't care. The only thing that bothered me was the idea of her playing with my clothes again. As much as I liked going naked in her presence, I couldn't tolerate doing that all the time, especially in front of sausage eating dinosaurs.

I showed her into a nearby room containing dressers stuffed to bursting with lady things, gesturing for her to try them on, and she put the wrong things on her head. I had to actually show her how to dress like a woman.

She liked that a little too much, and we came close to testing the bed springs, but then I thought about the body decomposing near the entrance. I hugged myself and pointed down the hall.

She sighed and nodded, allowing me to select a blouse and skirt for her. They showed off a little too much, but I'm a guy, and she was used to wearing nothing anyway. Heck, she hadn't even cared that my mouth tasted like vomit when she kissed me.

I stumbled across a bathroom, and I was stepping out, I noticed a door called hydroponics. Familiar with the concept from Star Trek, I opened the door and found a large garden inside. Immediately, I dragged Eve there to see it, then hugged myself, pointing to the hall, then pointing to the dirt. She nodded, and then we were dragging the big heavy pile of blankets down the twisting hallways.

As we did this, Eve started singing a song that sounded like the chorus of Good Vibrations with the wrong notes, and mangled bits of the Memories song from CATS. I didn't want to mock what was possibly a funeral dirge, so I kept my mouth shut.

The moment we reached hydroponics with the body, my bride stuck her fingers in an empty dirt patch, pulling out clod after clod of soil like some kind of pathetic dog burying a bone.

As you can tell, I'm not a genius. I'm not brilliant, but I'm not that stupid. So while she's slowly scratching at the dirt and making pitiful whining howls like some kind of animal, I'm looking for a shovel.

I searched up and down the walls for a moment, wondering why everything in the building had inverted Frisbees covering it, until I came across a small door containing a sort of tool shed.

The Doctor must have been an avid gardener, but had given it up at some point. A lot of things were covered in cobwebs, including the shovel and a rack of books about gardening.

The moment I put my hand on the shovel, I was struck with the thought that this woman, my new wife, was really my ancestor. Only someone related to me would try to metaphorically attempt to reinvent the square wheel. Not in this particular situation, to be sure, but many others.

I brought the shovel over, and got a fairly good sized hole going when I found Eve's hand clamping on my wrist, and she was pulling the shovel out of my grip.

I thought she wanted to shovel, but when I stepped away to look for a second shovel, she called to me, gesturing for me to dig in the dirt with my hands.

I shook my head violently.

They say it's wrong to interfere with other cultures, like you destroy it by introducing Western ideas and values to it. People wouldn't be saying that if you had to live with them. Flush toilets are Western. Dentists are Western. Modern shovels are definitely Western.

I wasn't about to join her in digging a six foot trench with my fingers, so I pulled a spade and one of those long tree planting shovels that's not really good for digging graves Square wheels, but at least a bit more rounded on the corners.

I showed her the tools, then resumed shoveling with the other shovel.

She took the shovel away again.

I sighed and buried it in the dirt, slumping on the floor. She, in the meantime, resumed digging with her hands. I could only stare at the floor in sullen silence.

She grabbed my hand, placing it on the hole, and I gave my head an even more violent shake. There was no way I was going to dig a six foot hole with my bare hands.

She flexed her arm, to which I mimed pointing to an invisible watch. She didn't get it, so I gave her the Indian sign for sunrise and sunset that I learned a long time ago in Boy Scouts. Then I grabbed the spade and picked at the hole.

She jabbered at me for a whole minute, and I didn't understand a bit of it, except for the part where she hugged herself. I figured it was their custom of respect to bury a person with your bare hands or something, but that's a little too much respect for me.

Having enough of the whole thing, I got up and walked away, but as I neared the hallway, I heard her crying, and my heart just broke.

With a sigh, I walked back to her, struggling with my thoughts as I watched her weeping as she slowly pulled the dirt away.

At last I gave up and joined her, pulling the dirt away with my hands. Then she started singing a dirge that sounded like the Peanuts song, to which I just rolled my eyes.

As I'm digging, I start seriously wondering what happened to this Doctor person, and why he was dead. I'd thought about this lots of times, but I'd been too distracted with not getting killed to give it serious thought. What if I end up dying like him? If I did, there was nothing I could do about it. There was no way to determine the cause of death without a body.

After doing this for a few minutes, I sneaked the trowel in. She didn't stop me, she just whined and howled like a dog as she dug with her hands.

Ten minutes later, she cried and took the trowel, and I started back in with the shovel. She didn't stop that either.

In fact, after collapsing with tears pouring down her face, she took the other shovel and joined me, her bare calloused feet pounding on the shovel's other lip like she had boots on.

The dirt didn't go down six feet. It was more like four and a half, and there was a layer of white glowing stuff squirming on the bottom. This explained why there were cucumbers when the gardening tools had cobwebs on them.

With tears in her eyes, Eve hugged herself, pointed at the stuff and shook her head no.

I sighed, shrugged, then hugged myself and pointed at the ceiling.

She blinked at me in confusion, so I hugged myself, pointed at the corpse, and shook my head, repeating the gesture I had made at the ceiling.

She responded by hugging me and nodding her head vigorously.

Heartened by my crude simplistic theology, she grabbed hold of her father's shroud, gesturing for me to do the same, and we dumped him in, staring down at the blankets.

I resisted the urge to say "he was a good man" and just said a prayer.

She stared at me.

I picked up a clod of dirt and threw it on the body. She stared at that too. I began to get the idea that her people did that kind of thing while digging.

She bowed her head, mumbling something, then threw dirt on the body as well.

We buried him, and then she ripped her blouse in ritual fashion and cried on my shoulder.

All that work with nothing since the bloody chicken made my stomach ache. I rubbed my belly, gesturing to the hallway, and she agreed that some comfort food would be appreciated.

Instead of following me down the tunnel to seek out food, she made a beeline for the place where the lizard corpses were. I just rolled my eyes and followed her.

As we progressed, I found a broom closet along one of the hallways, as well as a kitchen, though it seemed to be seldom used. I handed Eve a couple steak knives, making belly rubbing motions while pointing down the hall.

Still nauseous from all the blood and guts, so I figured she could do whatever she wants and I'd turn on the stove when she had the juiciest cuts selected.

And so I set about mopping up all the blood. It wasn't an easy task. The dinosaur blood caked instantly, and stuck on there thick. The closet had a hot water spout and a drain, and I kept having to change the water.

I had to put two scarves over my face to cope with the atomized rot. My wife, in the meantime, was making more messes with her chopping. Oh well, I thought, and I left that area for later cleanup.

Once she had a sizeable dinosaur shoulder ready, I astonished her by showing her how to operate the stove. I further astonished her by demonstrating how she could store the remaining "steaks" in the refrigerator.

Unfortunately, there was already food in there, and the machine was exactly the same size on the inside as it was on the outside.

Dr. Whatsitsname had stacked pizza boxes and unidentifiable food cartons on one shelf, crammed specimen jars and marmalade in the door, and something like an ostrich egg occupied one entire shelf. The crisper had some vegetable matter or another in it, and I could almost swear I saw something moving. Even the freezer was chock full of boxes with strange writing on them.

Pizza sounded a lot better than Bronto Burger at the moment, so I shared a few pieces of supreme and pepperoni with my partner. She emptied the rest of the box, and most of the next.

I ate a couple more pieces, until I was full, then slid the chunk of dinosaur shoulder in on the top of the box. My woman, in the meantime, had been sliding her hand along the wall and when I glanced at her, a section of the paneling slid open with a hum, and I was staring at a walk-in freezer.

"Hey!" I shouted.

She looked at my like she were sorry she upset me, but I clapped my hands gleefully, then pointed to the door, rubbed my belly, and pointed to the freezer.

She stared in confusion for a minute, then she must have remembered the pizza, for when I marched back to the entrance and grabbed a carcass, she picked up the other end, carrying it exactly where I wanted it.

Soon we had the room cleared, and I mopped it into a liveable state. The library carpet, though, I had no clue about, as I hadn't seen a single steam vac anywhere, and the pool seemed to be a lost cause.

The thought occurred to me that pools have drains at the bottom, so you only have to shut off the water to get the water out...or so I imagined. I found a shutoff valve below a bust of Mozart, and the water just seemed to sit there.

Figuring that such was natural for a pool of sticky gunk, I left it alone.

I was dead on my feet, about to pass out standing up, so I gave up on housekeeping for the day, or whatever measurement of time it was, marching into the nearest bedroom. It had no sheets or blanket, and it smelled strongly of women's perfume, but I didn't care. I immediately flopped down and closed my eyes, too tired to think about what Eve was doing until I heard the soft sound of clothing hitting the floor.

My eyes flicked open, and I saw her smile at me as she's slipping off her underwear and unbuttoning her blouse. Soon she's sitting on the bed naked, playing with my belt.

I shook my head, pantomiming sleep, and I pulled her to my side, arm around her bare shoulder. I felt her wrap around me, her head resting on me as we both drifted off to sleep.

A loud shriek awoke me in the early stages of REM sleep. I sat bolt upright and found Mrs. Wilson standing over a dead reptile with a steak knife stuck in its skull. I asked her if everything was okay, and she pantomimed sleep, which I gladly obliged.

A few hours later, though, I heard a second shriek, and my woman screaming, so I jumped out of bed, staggering down the hall in an aimless direction.

Suddenly I noticed a cloud of smoke wafting through the tunnel, and I was hearing one of those alarm bells like they have on submarines.

When I at last got to the entrance, I found Eve squatting naked next to yet another carcass, and there was a roaring fire on the floor, consisting of wooden artifacts and books she'd dug up from somewhere on the premises.

I was about to yell at her about it, but just then a fire sprinkler came on, and my clothes became a wet rag.

She giggled at me, offering me a fried dinosaur drumstick, but I shook my head, sternly pantomiming no fires. Then I cut a piece of the lizard's butt off with a serrated bread knife, demonstrating how to use the electric range in the kitchen (which she had thoughtlessly left on for who knows how long - every burning was glaring red at me like some angry demon).

She responded with one of those yells that cavemen on TV do when they discover fire.

The place had few cabinets, and the ones it had were crammed with items I couldn't recognize, shakers of glowing stuff with unreadable labels, paperboard boxes that suggested cereal but were covered in gibberish and didn't fit the standard grocery sizes, bottles of colored fluids that could be wine or cooking oil, and a tiny collection of recognizable supplies like canola oil, salt and paprika. We had a skillet, the kind you could remove cooked eggs from by blowing on it, and we had spatulas, so we were in business. Or rather she was. It was amazing how quickly she caught on.

I returned to her dead bonfire, staring at the sodden mess. She'd taken some shelves from something, dismantled a few chairs, tossed in a jewelry box and some papers for good measure, and there were all these books.

My eyes immediately went to a cover with the words `TARDIS Instruction Manual' on it.

The book was badly charred, but the middle was still intact. I tapped out the dying embers and stared at it.

Within the first few pages, I discovered I was standing inside something called a T40 TARDIS, and that TARDIS meant Time and Relative Dimensions In Space. A diagram showed me where the buttons were, and what did what...well, the unburnt portions did, at least. There was a cryptic line about the vehicle resetting to its original state when someone called a Time Lord perished, and something else about critical system failures if a replacement Time Lord was not found, but I didn't know what to make of it.

Hoping that Eve now knew enough not to cause a fire, I located a restroom and tried to use it, but as I was halfway through my business, my cavegirl friend pops her head in and laughs at what I'm doing. I try to shoo her out, but she's genuinely puzzled. Figuring she's never had potty training (I shuddered to think where she relieved herself), and she's seen everything on me anyway, I finished up in her presence and gave her a lesson on toilet operation, which resulted in her childishly playing with the flush handle.

With a sigh, I washed up and checked the kitchen to see what might be burning.

There's no safe cooking instructions for dinosaur meat. I rubbed some salt and olive oil on a chunk and found that it didn't brown. The stuff blackened before looking even remotely done. I peeled off the skin and periodically stabbed the meat with a fork until it cooked through enough to stop bleeding, but I wasn't sure if it were enough. It really didn't bleed that much to begin with.

I thought about dinosaur steak and eggs, but the egg in the fridge looked a little sketchy, so I settled for dinosaur meat by itself (the chunks were huge anyway).

As I'm sitting there, eating by myself, I contemplate using the other junk in the cabinets, but wondered if it would kill me. Maybe the Doctor didn't know where to put his Drano, I thought. But then I considered all the mistakes I've made throughout my life, and figured it wouldn't be too big a loss. So I sprinkled the glowing blue junk on a corner of the steak.

The stuff tasted like chocolate covered garlic covered rotten lettuce. If I knew where the trash can was, I would have tossed it.

The thought occurred to me that I should do some spring cleaning, but I still couldn't shake the feeling I was squatting in someone's house, and the owner would kill me. Already he'd be pissed about the books.

My wife joined me at the table, and I didn't know how to ask her if she had washed her hands.

I decided I didn't care, and handed her a plate. She loved it, grunting nonsense syllables as compliments.

She started by eating with her hands, but picked up the silverware when she saw me using it. The result was comical, and at last I knew what Asian people felt when they saw a Texan redneck trying to use chopsticks. She eventually went back to using her hands.

Since the meat needed something, I braved the glowing blue stuff again, and vowed to never do it again. Eve, on the other hand, loved it.

At first, she poured too much on her plate, but after some displeased grimacing, she was sprinkling it all over the place.

Remembering a pair of toothbrushes poking out of a cabinet in the bathroom, and out of the desperate need to not kiss a woman with dog breath (and to not offend her with mine), I boiled them in scalding hot water and gave Eve a lesson in oral hygiene. At first she didn't get it, eating the toothpaste and such, but after a little patient instruction, I witnessed a layer of plaque that would force a dentist into an early retirement vanish from her front teeth with a few simple scrubs.

My next immediate order of business was to figure out how to get home, so I returned to the "Console Room", the entrance's description on the map I saw on page five, comparing the manual to the "console" with all the arcade accessories on it.

To be blunt, it was very little help. It was like buying a Toyota Prius and being handed the instruction manual for a 1985 Tercel. All I could glean was a general outline.

The book had something called a Time Rotor, but all I had was a holographic image of something that looked like a lava lamp, and that only came on when I accidentally bumped something. The most instructional thing I found in that was the fact that it had something to do with time travel.

Whether or not I was my own grandpa, what removing Eve from time did to history, or why there were dinosaurs existing side by side with cavemen were topics that fell well outside the scope of the material.

My woman wrapped her arm around my waist, staring at the book. I could tell she thought it a bunch of meaningless symbols.

The book described external cameras, which I really needed, but the console lacked the aforementioned activation switches, so the information did me no good.

Eve playfully spun a crank on one of the panels. I would have slapped her hand away, but I didn't know what the hell the crank did anyway. It's not like she could have made things any worse, or at least worse by my definition of the word.

There wasn't anything specifically stating that this was the Year X in Country Y. There were dialogs on monitors, but they were full of hieroglyphics resembling Klingon. In the book, the symbols seemed decorative, like faux Elvish in someone's collection of fantasy paintings, but the console had it all over the place, and it seemed essential for the understanding of the machine, like Japanese on an imported stereo. The fact there was English in the manual at all was a mystery. I could only guess by positioning what device was what. Then Eve snatched the book away, crumbling a couple pages to powder as she carelessly flipped through it. I didn't scold, since the book didn't help anyway.

I figured my next move would be trial and error, but I was going to be scientific and careful about it. She had turned a crank, so I opened the door to see the result. It was nothing. We still sat in a desert, but a large dune had piled up during the night, so now we had sand all over the floor. I figured it helped soak up the blood anyway, so I left it alone.

One of the monitors reminded me of video slots, a display of ten consecutive columns of faux Elvish that you could move up and down like tumblers on some sort of digital bicycle lock. I rolled the counter on the end around, and saw the sand outside the door grow bigger. Rolling it down the other way made it shrink, so I could only assume it had something to do with years, but I couldn't account for the discarded dinosaur head, and blood not being all over the place again (not that I minded). The symbols meant nothing to me, so I couldn't tell you what exactly I was looking at. It probably would have made more sense in New York City where I would have at least seen Model T's and stuffy types dressed like the guy from the Monopoly box if I went back too far.

As I was flipping some switches on a nearby panel, Mrs. Wilson held a live scorpion up to my face and I screamed like a pansy.

After yelling for her to throw it out, I immediately grabbed a broom and swept the sand back outside and closed the door double quick. Eve's hands were empty, so I figured she'd tossed the critter when I wasn't looking.

I resolved then and there to do my damndest to relocate.

I guessed that the slot machine controlled time, but little else, so I flipped a couple switches just to flip them, opening the door again. I wished I had a monitor of the outside, but I didn't know where it was. I saw nothing new, just the same sand dunes and a dust storm on the horizon.

My woman got bored, disappearing down the hallway as I fiddled with some more switches.

I found and activated a sort of shortwave radio, which I could control with old fashioned dial knobs, volume and squelch levers, but got nothing but static on its ridiculously large range of bands and frequencies.

I thought for sure that the video game controller would get us somewhere, but all it did was scroll through menus of gibberish and move an icon on a grid. The associated buttons seemed to be related to the windows on the screen, and I could use the Vic-20 keyboard to type on boxes, but when I typed anything cute like Mayflower 1492, or Lee's Summit, MO 1997, it didn't do anything. I assumed it was because I didn't phrase it in the form of a question or something, and I spent several minutes scowling at the monitor as I moved around a cursor with the track ball.

Hearing footsteps, I glanced over and saw Eve had found a new outfit, a red leather jacket over a strange orange shirt made of sown together rags, and a patchwork denim loincloth. She gestured to her clothes, tilting her head as if to say "What do you think?"

I smiled and shrugged. "You look nice." And I nodded a lot, trying to communicate approval. I would have said that if she had on a bunny suit or a clown costume. Who was she trying to impress, anyway? At least it wasn't a bear skin.

I couldn't decipher her reaction any more than I could decipher that crumbling instruction manual. She didn't seem to be super pleased nor one hundred percent happy.

I rolled my eyes as she dug into her cleavage. This was not someone I wanted to take to the Olive Garden. A moment later, she was waving a small white device in my face. An Ipod, by the looks of it. I wasn't sure how or why it was charged, or where it came from, but it showed a full battery.

The previous owner of the device seemed to have eclectic tastes. Beach Boys, Mozart, Iron Maiden, Parliament, Marilyn Manson, Statler Brothers, XIBIT, Snoop Dog, The Gospel Tabernacle Choir...and a bunch of foreign language tracks that apparently needed a non-English character set.

The device was useless without headphones, and I tried to tell her so.

Guess where those were.

At any rate, she had them, and so I plugged them in, popping one of its buds in her ear as I pushed play on a random song.

Random unfortunately happened to be The Macarena.

At first, she gasped and let out an animal yell, nearly breaking the device as she jumped back, but then she starts making I Have Discovered Fire noises, and she's doing some bizarre tribal dance which was, in my estimation, ten times better than the original dance (though it's not difficult to beat the worst dance of all time). She was excited as people were when the song first came out, and all the more so because she'd never witnessed prerecorded music before.

She suddenly dug a piece of black chalk out of her jacket, scribbling on the wall. I wasn't too happy about that, but when I discovered she was writing words, I stopped being upset.

She pulled me over to the scribbles, pointing to each as she sounded them out. "Mall karenahs! Mall kareen karenas! Ay mock kurenicas!"

I had a feeling like I had stumbled over some sort of Rosetta Stone, but I couldn't figure out anyuse for this particular bit of information except establishing Mariachi bands at the beginning of time.

I stared at the symbols, then I stared at her, and as she's jumping at the sounds of the Ramones, I am struck with a moment of uncharacteristic brilliance.

I start trying to write the symbols, sounding them out, and she corrects me, and soon we're writing English letters next to caveman symbols and laughing at our awkward communication. B is for bird, I teach her, then I spell the word and draw a picture of one. Having some skill with chalk, I do a passable Big Bird, and the picture makes her jump to her feet and yell.

"Big Bird!" she hollers, then she runs down the hallway.

Satisfied that she would be busy for at least a few minutes, I returned my attention to the console. I found the scorpion crawling along the top of one of the panels, but I didn't have anything good to use to pick it up without it stinging me, so I tried my best to work around it.

I toggled through some screens and pushed a button, hoping nothing would break.

Nothing happened for a solid minute, then, as I'm walking around to the other side, the floor starts to slant under me. I open the door again, and I'm staring at stars. No landmarks, no hills, no sand, just stars. So this is the S in TARDIS, I thought.

The fact that I didn't get sucked out in space made me again wonder if this were merely a funhouse with some malfunctioning dinosaur robots, with actors in bear skins added for extra realism. To me, things like forcefields and artificial gravity aren't real. I leaned out the door to examine what appeared to be the Eagle or Crab Nebula, and I noticed my hair flying around

I nearly fell out when I found a Sesame Street DVD being shoved in my face.

When she saw the stars, the DVD went flying, or floating, and I had to grab it before it got sucked into a nearby oort cloud or whatever DVD's do in that part of space.

She gasped and grunted, and we had a little language lesson about space stuff.

When the novelty wore off (neither one of us wanted to try jumping out), I asked her where she got the DVD and she led me back to a small den with a TV. Since Big Bird taught me so much about the English language when I was a kid, I popped it in and hoped for a breakthrough.

As retarded as I felt, I sat down and watched it with her, and I actually enjoyed myself. It was like reliving a piece of my childhood without all the yelling and breaking things.

I put my arm around Eve, trying to forget how as a child my feet had been dangling in the air as I tried to get my father's hands off my neck the first time I heard Maria saying something to Telly about not being scared of the dark.

When we got to the part where Big Bird was complaining about freezing his nonexistant giblets off while waiting for Santa, I couldn't take anymore, and I returned to the console room.

The thing with all the menus seemed to bring results, so I toyed with it again, trying to make my selections as careful and as slight in difference from the previous as possible. For a moment, nothing happened. It only looked like one of the stars had disappeared.

My woman returned from the den with dozens of DVD's sown to her vest and jacket. I was in between asking why she did it and where she got the thread when she waved a Barney DVD at me.

A moment later, it felt like an earthquake had hit the spaceship.

I opened the door, expecting Pompeii, but instead I found myself surrounded by what appeared to be giant chrome salt shakers.

The things stood as tall as I was, but I found them as threatening as an idling engine block. It didn't make me scream or wet my borrowed pants, but it wasn't the kind of thing I'd want to stick my fingers into, either.

The things had no arms, only toilet plungers and stubby objects resembling fluorescent light bulb tubes poking out of their shells. They had glowing lights on their lid parts, and mechanical eyeballs poking out of the front part of their lids, and grating below the lids seemed to take on the shape of frowns.

When their eye stalks turned to me, I saw each one of them pointing their fluorescent tubes and plungers at me.

Before I could do anything to stop her, I see Mrs. Wilson hurling a clod of sand and the scorpion at one of the machines, causing it to let out a strangled noise that reminded me of someone drowning inside a motorized golf cart. A second later, I hear the sound of a dozen angry voices screaming through scuba equipment.

I see flashes of light, something explodes, and my woman falls to the floor with a scream.


	7. Chapter 7: Riversong

I was surrounded by robots shaped like salt shakers, and one had just killed my wife. It was like a scene out of Chopping Mall. One of the robots had fired at my woman, a sort of death ray, I supposed, but she had sown a bunch of DVD's to her clothing (because they were pretty), and the laser had somehow bounced off due to the shiny material, causing one of the robots' heads to explode. The beam, however, was not your average laser beam, and DVD's are just a piece of plastic with a hole in it, so Eve fell to the floor with a scream.

I immediately dove to her side, raising my hands in surrender. Part of a wall exploded, knocking off one of those inverted Frisbee things, but then the robots seemed to pause for a moment.

I took the opportunity to check the damage. One of the DVD's had melted onto the jacket like a clock in Salvador Dali painting. I pulled the jacket back and found the Ipod melting onto her skin, and I could swear I heard dying strains of the Ketchup Song coming out of it.

I ripped the DVD off her jacket, scooping away the blackened circuit board the best I could.

Lucky for her, from what I could see through the hole in her shoddily quilted shirt, she had only received a mild scalding, the Ipod taking the brunt of the damage. She'd have a nasty sunburn mark for awhile, though.

I slowly pulled her to her feet, telegraphing every movement to the robots like I would a cop with a gun.

"INTRUDER!" I heard a robotic voice shout. "IDENTIFY YOURSELF!"

It sounded like a British man talking slowly through scuba gear. Eve let out a yelp, then growled and bared her teeth.

I placed a hand to her shoulder. "Careful! Don't tick them off!" I hissed.

I put on a fake smile, waving at the machines. "Hi! Can you understand me?"

The lights on one of the things flashed as a voice spoke. "WE CAN UNDERSTAND! IDENTIFY YOURSELF OR BE DESTROYED!"

"I...I'm Robert, my friend is Eve. Where am I?"

The robot raised a fluorescent tube thing, and suddenly the console exploded. "WE WILL ASK THE QUESTIONS! WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THIS FACILITY! ANSWER!"

I shrugged, staring into the steel warehouse beyond their heads. "I got lost. I don't know how to operate this thing."

The robots swiveled their heads, as if debating something with their comrades.

"YOUR RESPONSE IS NOT SATISFACTORY! PREPARE TO DIE!"

I braced myself for a blast of microwave radiation, but nothing happened.

I think the only reason why the things hadn't vaporized me, or whatever it was they did, was because a black and white robot had growled something to them about something called Dalek Command. A moment later, this dalmatian looking thing was rolling up the door, pointing its eyestalk at me. "CONFIRM IDENTIFICATION. FIRST AND LAST NAME."

Taking the calmer tone to be a good sign, I introduced myself and Eve to the robot. I told him (or her?) Eve's last name was Oog, which seemed to be a good enough answer for it.

"THEY ARE COMPANIONS OF THE DOCTOR," I heard a stupid sounding gray robot saying.

"WHERE IS THE DOCTOR!" another cried.

"The Doctor is dead," I shrugged.

"THAT DOES NOT COMPUTE."

"YOU ARE LYING!" said the white one.

"Why would I lie about that? I don't even know the guy! I found the guy lyaying in the yard. No breathing, no pulse."

The white one rolled back and forth in a sort of irritated rolling dance. "HE HAS TWO HEARTS."

"I'm pretty sure I would have heard at least one of them!"

The white one backed up, conferring with its companions.

"THE DOCTOR CAN REGENERATE," said one.

"HE IS STILL ALIVE."

I blinked. "You mean reincarnate?"

"ARE YOU STUPID?"

"THE DOCTOR IS A TIME LORD," said the white. "HE CAN DIE MULTIPLE TIMES."

"THE DOCTOR NEVER DIES. WE HAVE KILLED HIM OVER AND OVER AND HE KEEPS COMING BACK. WHERE IS THE DOCTOR? ANSWER! ANSWER!"

"He's on earth," I shrugged. "Probably in a morgue."

"WHY ARE YOU IN SECTOR B26A51E84?"

"It was an accident!" I waved at the console. "I don't know how to pilot this thing!"

The white one rolled through the door. "A PROBLEM THAT IS EASILY RECTIFIED."

I didn't like the sound of that, but they had death rays.

It rolled up to the console, and as it did, a miniature robotic arm popped out below its grille beneath its dome, its tiny metal fingers pushing buttons and flipping switches. "YOU ARE DISMISSED. VACATE THE VEHICLE IMMEDIATELY TO PREPARE FOR PROCESSING."

The statement seemed vaguely Nazi-esque. I stayed where I was until I saw its fluorescent tube pointing at me. The camera eye on its eyestalk seemed to bulge with fury. "OBEY! YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS TO COMPLY!"

"Okay, okay! I'm going!"

I'm sure the Doctor had a cool way to solve this particular dilemma, but I didn't, so I stepped outside, the sinking feeling in my stomach getting heavier as I heard the familiar grinding sound. When I saw the phone booth vanish, the feeling got worse, to the point where I almost threw up.

The robots silently led us through the warehouse and down a plain gray concrete corridor.

The corridor led to a second warehouse, wherein my woman got the bright idea of running away.

I hollered, but it was too late. She got away before I could hold her back.

She only gained a few yards before I saw a brilliant flash, and she fell to the floor with a scream. I yelled, but the robots blocked me from running to her.

"KEEP MOVING," one of them ordered.

"THE FEMALE IS UNCONSCIOUS, BUT LIVING," said the other. "VITAL FUNCTIONS OPERATIONAL."

"UNIT WILL BE RETRIEVED FOR PROCESSING."

"Is that all she is to you? A unit?"

They paused as if giving the question serious thought, then they simply replied, "YES."

"INCREASE IN FACIAL TEMPERATURE UNNECESSARY. FEMALE WILL ACCOMPANY YOU TO PROCESSING FACILITY."

I had no weapons, and the things surrounded me on all sides. Seeing as there was nothing I could do, and there was still a chance my woman was alive, I followed my captors through the warehouse, marching through a long convoluted maze of identical looking concrete tunnels.

After several yards of this, I at last arrived at a block of jail cells with bars resembling that of a cage for a large breed dog, but more thickly reinforced.

I was led into an open cell in between two other cells at the start of the tunnel, then ordered to stand by the back wall while they locked me inside.

They left me alone, and, after the last one had rolled away, I slumped to the floor, crushed, dejected, and utterly without hope.

"I recognize that shirt," I heard a female voice saying in the next cell.

I was too depressed to look up. I only shrugged and said, "You probably shop at the same store."

"Only if we both shop at the TARDIS storeroom," the woman protested. "I've seen it there. I'm sure of it. The shoulder is even fraying on the left side."

Startled, I glanced up and saw a middle aged caucasian face framed in curly blonde hair. I noted with some amusement that her pale makeup appeared to be applied a centimeter too thick. I also noticed she had a striking resemblance to one of the female doctors on ER.

"How's Doctor Greene?" I asked with a smirk on my face.

She had no idea what I was talking about. Her expression was blank as a slate. "Excuse me?"

I just laughed and shook my head.

She didn't share my mirth, so I sighed and stared at her face and space uniform in puzzlement. "Who are you?"

"Don't you remember me?"

Now it was my turn to look at her like she were crazy. "Unless you're the woman from TV, I don't know you from Adam."

"You've regenerated, haven't you? That's it, isn't it? Poor dear, you really don't remember a thing."

"I'm not the Doctor, if that's what you're implying. I'm just a dumb guy who found his phone booth."

I saw her hands clamping white knuckled to the bars. "Where is he!" she yelled.

I frowned at the patches on her gray space uniform. "He's dead."

I could hear a choking sob rising in her throat. "No! No! It can't be! Did you check both hearts?"

"I put my head to his chest. I would have heard something."

"It was his last regeneration!" She broke down in tears, staggering back from the bars.

She flopped on the floor, and for several minutes she was completely inconsolable.

When she had calmed down a bit, I attempted communication. "What's your name?"

"Riversong," she sniffed.

"Riversong, can you tell me what the hell is going on?"

"It's an experiment. The less you know about it, the better. It's not like you can do anything about it anyway."

"No, I mean, what about everything else? What is that blue phone booth thing? What is a TARDIS? Is it real? What year is it?"

The woman wiped her eyes, then laid down the missing details. The Doctor was an alien from the planet Gallifrey. The phone booth was modeled after a London police box, and it assumed that shape as camouflage before getting stuck that way. It was sort of a spaceship with an extra dimension inside. The robots were called Daleks and they liked killing things, and it was the year 4023.

I asked her about the dinosaurs and other things, but she had no clue about what I was talking about.

The woman suddenly gasped. "Where's the TARDIS?"

I told her what happened, and her expression became drawn and grave, her knees seeming to give way beneath her. "You were better off dying," she moaned. "Now they have the TARDIS, they can travel back in time and destroy everyone before they were born, including us. The whole time war with all its bloodshed will count for nothing! How could you let them take it!"

I shrugged. "They have laser guns."

"Don't you ever sweep the area before opening the TARDIS doors?"

I shook my head no. "I read about a CCTV, I don't know where the monitors are."

She beat her head against the bars.

"We're screwed," I said.

She sunk to the floor. "I agree with that assessment." With a sigh, she added, "You really are an idiot."

Considering the circumstances, I didn't disagree. I slumped down on the flat uncomfortable prison bed, staring at the bars.

"You don't happen to have a sonic screwdriver, do you?"

"That's just an expression."

"What?"

"I don't have a screwdriver."

"No, a *sonic* screwdriver."

"I have a sonic toothbrush in my in my apartment. Does that count?"

"I'm talking about a tool, rocks for brains! Something that can get us out of here!"

I paused. "Does it look like a socket wrench?"

She shrugged. "Perhaps? It has a glowy end on one side, and it spins..."

I remembered seeing the socket wrench things with the light bulbs on them in the storage room. "It's in the TARDIS."

"A fat lot of good it's doing there!"

"I thought everything was a toy!" I protested. "I don't believe in dimensions and time travel!...I mean, I didn't."

After that, we didn't speak to each other for a long time.

I looked into the cell on my opposite side and found a little girl in a similar looking astronaut outfit sitting cross legged on the floor. I waved to her. "Hello?"

"Hulloh," she said.

"What's your name?"

"River Song."

I glanced back at the other Riversong and she suddenly stood up. "Oh! That's right! I remember you now!"

Before I could get an explanation about the woman's strange reaction, I noticed the door of my cell scraping open.

When I looked up, I discovered that these robots, the Daleks, had returned my wife to me, but something had changed.

Instead of the loincloth thing she'd been wearing, she had on a form fitting white jumpsuit, her hair had been cropped short in a butch haircut, and her eyes and face no longer searched the terrain like a caged tiger.

"Eve?" I stammered.

With a smile, she gave me a nod, marching into my cell.

As she came close, I saw something like squid tentacles dropping out of the sides of her hair, and an enormous eye opened up on her forehead.

"Robert...my dear husband."


	8. Chapter 8: Dalek Land

The tentacles on my wife's head quivered as I stared into the big cyclopean eye above her smaller human ones. I shuddered. "What did they do to you!"

Her tentacles curled up like a spider above a flame, her lip pursing like she were going to cry. "You don't like it?"

I cringed.

I felt bad for hurting her feelings, but then again, I didn't know whose feelings they were. The woman I knew and married only spoke in grunts. Either way, I decided it best to approach her with love. Maybe she could help me escape.

A tear rolled down her cheek.

Even if she looked like a freak lab experiment, I didn't want to hurt her feelings any more. "Eve, they ruined your lovely face! They stuck...(I wanted to say crap) things through your skull! That's not okay!"

A tear rolled out of her big eye. "I...know. But they said it was for the betterment of the Dalek race, and the galaxy."

"Mostly the Dalek race," a voice called from the other cell.

Suddenly, tears were dripping out of all three eyes. "Do you think I'm ugly?"

Not a very easy thing to answer when you're staring at a cyclops eye.

Her lips trembled. I could tell she was about to start sobbing. She made *me* want to cry.

"I ain't a looker," I said, gesturing to my pathetic physique. "Who am I to judge?"

The large eye narrowed as it bore down on me. "You...still love me?"

I touched my scars, and she laughed and touched her own.

"Yes, I am your wife."

That made me smile.

"You put yourself down too much," she said. "I think you look cute."

It's weird that a bizarre monstrosity like that could make me blush. I came close, reached up and touched the dangling tentacles on her head. Our lips met, and we were kissing.

Her mouth tasted like boiled cabbage, that chipotle sauce they have at Taco Bell, and something medicinal, and she seemed to have two additional tongues, but my body didn't care. In fact, I found it thrilling in an exotic sort of way.

"Ugh!" cried the voice in the peanut gallery. "Are you sure you aren't the Doctor?"

I broke away from Eve, staring at the woman who claimed she wasn't on ER. "Is it reversible? This...(again, I didn't want to offend my wife) condition?"

She shrugged. "They don't call it an experiment if they know how to reverse it."

Eve put a hand on my shoulder. "Dear husband. You should be pleased. For the first time, we can finally speak the same language!"

"At what price?"

"My whole village was killed by velociraptors, and my mother was knocked off a cliff by a sabretooth tiger. You are all I have now." She clutched my hand. "Come with me."

*So that's what those things were.* I frowned at the robots, refusing to move. "Where are we going."

"To processing, of course!" She spoke about it in a tone of one discussing a carnival.

I didn't budge. "No."

"Why?" she pouted. "Don't you love me?"

I swallowed. "I don't want that shit stuck in my brain."

Her expression was desperate. Pleading. Tears poured down her face. "But don't you see? We'd both be ideal! There would be no more loathing or disgust! We'd be the same!"

I swallowed. I was about to say `What disgust,' since I was warming up to her new look, but I definitely hated the whole concept of what they did to her. "Eve, baby," I sighed. "Just because I like your breasts doesn't mean I want to wear a pair of my own!"

She giggled for a minute, then got serious. "We have to purify the galaxy, Robert. You have to accept treatment 9856 for the good of all. Only when all lifeforms accept 9856 will there be perfect peace and an end to all war!"

"The Arayan Brotherhood uses similar reasoning," I argued. "And it doesn't make the world any better."

She blinked for a minute, like she didn't understand, but then somehow she kept up with me. "Those individuals have a substandard intelligence, virtually identical to the primitive ape brain I once had."

I stepped back from her a little. "Eve. You're scaring me."

She shrugged. "I'm sorry, honey. It wasn't my intention. I only wanted you to understand the situation. With superior Dalek intelligences, we will have harmony. Sophistication. Unification of purpose. All the defects of humanity will be eliminated. We will have no more retarded persons, no more Alzheimer

s cases, no more overweight depressed individuals. Only one single evolutionarily superior race."

I could only stare at her in horror. This Dalek thing had taken over my wife's body. Essentially I counted her as dead. I listened to her in numb silence.

"Your harmony is the homogenization of the entire universe!" I heard Riversong shout.

"That's just the beginning. When all other species have been eliminated, we will have only completed a third of our ultimate goal. It's not so bad."

"Your sophistication brings death! And you're only unified in the slaughter of millions of intelligent beings!"

"She's lying!" Eve shouted.

I grabbed her hands. "Tell me. Is she wrong? What exactly are they going to do, then?"

Her lip trembled, and tears rolled down her face. "I...I don't know. I'm so confused."

"Is your `primitive ape brain' actually gone, then?"

"Um..." She bit her lip, glancing back and forth, then she simply touched her finger to her mouth.

I raised an eyebrow, but she didn't explain. Instead, she tugged my hand. "Please, husband. Come with me. Let us both be unified in the great Dalek society!"

"No!" I shouted.

"Husband, if you do not come with me, you will never see me again."

I swallowed. "So be it."

She started crying. "Don't you love me? Doesn't our marriage mean anything to you?"

I felt this was going to be the end. "Can't we work something else out? I want to be by your side, without having to put a thing in my brain."

"I'm sorry, we can't coexist like that. We must be unified in substance and purpose. Come with me."

When I pulled my hand free, she yanked my hair and pulled me close, wrapping her arms around me as she pressed her lips seductively to my ear. "If you want to escape, act like you've changed your mind."

She pulled away.

"On...second thought," I stammered. "I really don't want to lose you...brain surgery can't be all bad, can it?"

"No," Eve grinned.

"What!" Riversong shouted. "Are you daft! Have you no brains to remove to begin with? She's going to destroy everything that makes you you, and you're going to let her?"

I shrugged. "Isn't that the definition of marriage?" I smirked. "Besides, I don't want to be apart from her. What can I do?" I pantomimed zipping my lips. "Thanks for all the information."

"Yeah," the woman mumbled weakly. "Good luck." She stuck her face up to the bars. "And if you don't get caught doing something stupid, tell the governor I've been a good little girl." She winked at me as she said this, which I took to mean I was supposed to launch a rescue attempt.

I could only sigh and wonder if I'd even be able to save my own skin.

Eve led me into the throng of Daleks, and then we were marching down through a maze of concrete tunnels again.

As I walked, a disturbing thought occurred to me. Riversong knew everything about the TARDIS, and Daleks. I knew nothing. I shuddered, my stomach seeming to sink below my knees as the inescapable conclusion assembled itself in my mind. I had to save Riversong. This information I could communicate with no one, for I trusted neither Eve nor the Daleks, but we, I, would have to go back, or I would forever be trapped in Dalek Land.

The concrete opened into large plexiglass windows overlooking row upon row of incubator machines containing one eyed squid things. The rooms were a dirty white-yellow, and the humidity fogged the windows so bad that nothing else could be discerned, save for the outlines of dark machinery lowering more and moer of those things into vacant incubators. It oddly reminded me of the baby wing at a hospital.

As I stared at the things, Eve wrapped her arm around my shoulder, and I found myself shuddering at the thought of one of those deformed babies being ours.

"This is where they take the Superior Ones after they're born!" Eve said with excitement. "These lifeforms are what go inside the Dalek machine shells."

"You think our child will look like one of those?"

She gasped. "Wouldn't that be wonderful?"

I suddenly had to eat my words, since I still wasn't quite sure what I was dealing with. "Yeah. Super." I feigned a smile, beginning to doubt she'd prevent my brain from being removed.

The Daleks barked something. Eve tugged my arm. "C'mon."

The incubators disappeared, and now I saw nothing but machines dropping chemicals into test tubes, machines pouring the chemicals into steel eggs, machines sticking the eggs inside glowing cabinets things.

A door opened on the left side of the hallway, and I found myself being led into a room full of people strapped to tables, with wire cages encasing their bodies. These people could only scream as machines dropped down from the ceiling, depositing squirming tentacled eel things on their faces.

These creatures could split in two pieces, one crawling up the victim's nose, the other larger part wiggling into their mouth, nearly gagging them in the process. After being invaded, the victims seemed to calm down and breathe normally, but their bodies were prone to frequent spasms.

Others further along than that had swelling blisters on the sides of their shaved heads, and, as I watched, the tentacles exploded from the blisters, and giant eyes opened and glanced around wildly from their heads.

Eve opened an empty cage, patting the steel table like it were our honeymoon bed.

"Eve," I stammered. "I trusted you!"

Her tentacles curled up against her scalp, her features turning grave. "Then don't stop now. Lay down! Quickly!"

I didn't obey. "I don't want to be one of those."

She made the safety gesture.

Realizing that we'd had this conversation before under different circumstances, I swallowed, touching my scar.

She nodded, a tear rolling out of her largest eye.

I meekly climbed up on the table, knowing full well it might be the last time I'd actually existed as a person.


	9. Chapter 9: Rescue

As the cage came down around me, I found I couldn't turn my head, but I could still catch glimpses of things out of the corners of my eyes. I could see the other victims strapped to tables. I could see the Dalek robots. I could see the machines lowering squirming creatures on people's faces.

Someone gurgled next to me. How long would it be before I had one of those things in my throat?

One wasn't coming for me yet, but it was only a matter of seconds before one would. A machine dropped down from the ceiling, cutting my hair down to tiny bits of stubble.

I felt alone. Betrayed by the woman I loved. Ashamed of my own stupidity. I felt depressed that this would be the way my life ended. I hated my wife. I hated Riversong for not being helpful. I felt...puzzlement.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her doing something to one of the Daleks. Poking something, turning one of the bubbles on the thing's armor, and then I heard a protesting scuba regulator scream, and she was holding up one of those fluorescent tube things, complete with the hidden metal box thing that it attached to, and something exploded.

That was the last thing before I saw a ghastly squid thing dropping down over my face.

I would have screamed, but I knew it would be like putting a big welcome mat in front of my mouth and telling it to come in. Unable to move, I could only squirm and clamp my teeth shut, sort of puffing my nostrils in hopes I could keep the thing out of there.

The moment the tentacle touched my lower lip, I saw a female hand close around the creature's heads, squeezing into a fist. Black blood sprayed all over my face, and I found the cage flying open.

Quickly, I jumped off the table, and I was in the middle of an exploding laser light show.

The Daleks only stood at a certain height, and their laser cannons only pointed down so far, so my woman took advantage of this by hiding under tables and sniping at them with the tube thing. They blasted away a few tables and people in the process, but she'd just move to another, barricading herself in with shattered tables whenever the robots got in a good firing angle.

As she dragged me along with her, I offered to fire the laser, but she told me I couldn't, I'd have to undergo the treatment first.

She then blew up several of the squid laying machines, ushering me to a door at the end of the room.

"We have to rescue Riversong," I said as we pushed out into a hall full of screaming robots.

"First we find safety," she said. Then she blasted a row of robots to pieces.

Eve stuck her hand out straight, spreading her fingers, and a door across the hall opened on its own accord.

Another robot exploded, then I found myself being dragged through the opening and down a narrow passage that appeared to be built from cinder blocks.

She pointed a hand at the hall behind us, clenched a fist, and the door slid shut, dimming the light to a feeble yellow haze.

Immediately, she set down the gun, blocking my passage with her arm. The next moment, she's shoving me against the wall like a jock trapping the prom queen at the school lockers, and we're kissing.

Despite the bizarre taste and the tongue tentacles, I was excited, and didn't break away from her until the angry robotic voices got louder. That and the guilt caused me to stop. I thought about how I ruined her life, and then I thought about my fellow prisoner.

"Riversong," I blurted. "She knows about the TARDIS. The woman in the cell next to mine. We have to rescue her."

Suddenly I heard a young girl's voice. "Then would you mind rescuing me from this vent!"

I turned and saw a teenager with dirty blonde hair glaring at us from the slats of an air conditioner vent. I stared at her in shock. "How did you get in there?"

"Magic."

"You look...different. How many Riversongs are there in this place?"

"Never mind that," she growled. "Did you find a sonic screwdriver yet!"

The lady who had occupied the prison cell next to me was named Riversong. The little girl in the cell on the other side had also been named Riversong. And now, as I stood in a narrow concrete tunnel, hiding from killer robots, I find a teen with that same name talking to me like she was the adult I spoke to earlier. My immediate conclusion was that these Dalek things were cloning human beings like the lady in Resident Evil, in addition to sticking squirmy things in their brains. She had asked for a sonic screwdriver, but I told her I didn't have one. I said it only made me think of an alcoholic beverage.

"Were you only trying to remove some bolts?" Eve asked.

Riversong let out a sigh. "Obviously! Do you have a tool or not!"

Without a word, Eve just raised a hand and spread her fingers in the direction of the grate.

I saw a blue glow emanating from her palm as bolts seemed to rotate and fall out on their own. The grate clattered to the floor, and the dirty blonde girl clambered out, frowning at my companion, turning her hand over with a sad look on her face. "You poor girl." She cast me a sideways glance. "You poor, poor girl. Be thankful he has an open mind. No offense, but I don't think you'll do much better."

I scowled at her. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"She has three eyes and tentacles. Do I need to paint you a picture?" She paused. "Of course, there are so men on Gumac 9 that like a good cyclops..."

"Are you a clone?" I asked.

She looked down at her space uniform and patted herself, as if to check. "No? Do I look like one?"

I shrugged. "I saw a child in the cell with the name Riversong, and then I-"

"...died in a fire fight, leaving me to my own devices for seven years. I know, I know. If it wasn't for that Denarius that fell out of your pocket when you sat down on the bed, I wouldn't have been able to escape before they put a thing in my brain."

I stared at her in astonishment. "I had a Jesus coin in my pocket?"

She shrugged.

My eyes narrowed. "I died?"

"Um hum?"

"Seven years have passed?"

"No. And I'm here to make sure you make it through all seven of them. Or at least rescue my younger self and make it to the TARDIS before you die. Whichever comes first."

"Wait a minute," I said. "If you used my coin to get out, why do I need to rescue you?"

She gave me this look that said "Doctor Greene, it's too late to save the patient." She sighed. "I didn't make it very far."

Her expression turned completely blank as a fissure opened in her forehead, a telescoping eyestalk poking out and staring at us while a threatening muzzle of some sort of weapon popped out of her upraised palm. "I'm sorry..." she croaked as she pointed the weapon at me. "Please understand I really don't want to do this..."

"No worries," Eve smiled.

She waved a glowing hand at the teenager, and the eyestalk slid back in her head smoothly as a CD deposited into a disk drive. The gun retracted, and she stared vacantly at me for a second before blinking several times and asking what happened.

At this point, it occurred to me that she actually did have something stuck in her brain, but there was nothing to be done about it at the moment. When I attempted to explain, Eve just elbowed me and said, "I'll tell you later."

"So..." I began again. "So you're saying you are actually your future self come to prevent us from being killed by robots."

She nodded.

I shook my head. "Cloning is much more believable."

The woman chided me with tisk sounds. "You really are thick."

"All right, Sarah Connor. If I died, why did your adult self see me in the cell?"

"Magic!"

I rolled my eyes. "Fine. Don't tell me. Tell me this, though. What happens if we rescue the little girl? Will you cease to exist or something?"

She seemed to pale a bit. "Yes and no, but if we can make things right, my life won't matter."

"That's a sad thing to say."

"You don't know what my life has been like!" she practically screamed.

We all fell silent, eyes darting back and forth for signs of Dalek alarms.

In a low voice, she said, "You're going to live this time. I am going to cease to exist, and you are going to bring that little girl out of this accursed place!"

"Wait," I said. "If we can do that, can we save Eve before she gets her brain cut open?"

"No," Riversong sighed. "Besides being the only one who can operate the laser, your girl wasn't conceived on a TARDIS like I was."

*Wow. I'm going to have weird kids,* I thought. I stared at her in puzzlement. "Why me? Why do you think I can actually help you?"

"For one, your girlfriend can unscrew bolts with her hand. For another, only you can show me the exact location of the Doctor's body. The fact that the TARDIS is still operational is a strong indicator that the Doctor is still alive," she said. "When the spirit of the Time Lord is gone, the spirit of the TARDIS dies with him."

I frowned. "What if you're wrong?"

"That's why I want to see the body. It's true, he didn't have any regenerations left, but the TARDIS shouldn't have worked."

"What if this TARDIS spirit likes someone else and decides to stick around?"

"What if?" She shrugged. "What if a Time Lord has more lives than we thought? What if said Time Lord can fix your girlfriend?"

"Good point."

"I'm his wife," said Eve. "We're married."

Ignoring this, I said, "What good is knowing the location? The Daleks stole the TARDIS!"

Riversong gasped in shock, smiling at my wife. "You're married? When did this happen?"

"A few days ago...um...thousands of years ago."

She practically squealed in excitement, shaking my wife's hand. "Congratulations, Mrs. er..."

"Wilson," I said.

Eve nodded.

"You're a lovely couple." She let out a heavy sigh. "We may not have the TARDIS, but if there's a will, there's a way. I've heard rumors of a Type 39 TARDIS buried out in the desert wastes. If we can get my selves out of here, and find a map..."

Eve went into a catatonic state for a minute. "I have detailed memories of floor plans and topographic maps of the planet Skaro," I heard her saying in a flat monotone. "Hence the reason for selecting this disused access corridor."

"You're scaring me," I said.

She turned her head and smiled. "Would it help if I kissed you again?"

I shrugged. "It might."

The door exploded.

"Save it for later, lovebirds!" Riversong cried, diving back in the vent she'd come from.

Eve picked up the laser, blasting the lid off of one of the robots.

"How are you doing that?" I heard a voice cry from the air duct.

"Strategically placed electromagnetic discharges." She fired a blast at the ceiling, creating an avalanche of debris.

Riversong popped back out. "Go!"

She took one step down the corridor, then collapsed on the concrete. I dove to her side, attemping to lift her to her feet, but I wasn't strong enough to pull it off. "Eve! What's wrong!"

"Too...weak," she moaned. "Blood sugar too low."

With a sigh, Riversong dug a small foil package out of her pocket, offering it to her. "Here. You can have my supper." Eve gave her a polite look like `No, you have it', but then Riversong added, "I do so love the taste of dog food."

Eve tried to eat the package whole.

"Unwrap it, dear."

I helped her with it, and she devoured whatever it was in a couple bites.

"How much of my wife is still in there?" I asked Riversong.

She swallowed. "It's difficult to say. Normally they have no free will. They only obey orders from Dalek High Command. But if what you told me about her being a cavewoman is correct, she might have been all brain stem. It may have short circuited her programming."

"Wouldn't it have made everything super easy?"

"You would think, but Mary Shelly had the same idea about giant bodies. Nothing is as simple as you think."

"Or maybe," Eve said from the floor. "Maybe it's just that both of us really love you."

I stared at Riversong in confusion. "Is there something you..."

"I have but one love..." the woman stammered.

"I was referring to me and the creature."

Riversong's face flushed red. "I am not-"

"The Dalek in my brain."

We both stared at her.

"Whew!" Riversong breathed a sigh of relief. "It's not me! What a relief!"

"The thing in your brain?" I said. "You and the thing in your brain? You both love me?"

She nodded.

"Stephanie Meyer would approve," I joked.

She smirked. "I remember that from my data pod."

"Your what?"

"Before I inhabited this body, I inhabited a...pod. One with access to all of Skaro's data systems."

"Kind of like the internet?"

"Not...exactly. Our pods contain all the knowledge in the known universe, and the speeds are beyond human comprehension." She groaned and staggered to her feet. "I'd exterminate for a wooly mammoth steak."

Riversong winced at the statement. "I'd go easy on the Dalek death ray until you get your strength back."

Eve staggered ahead a few paces, but I could tell she was having difficulty with the heavy gun thing. I offered to carry it for her, but she refused.

"You're sweet," she smiled. "But you're in no position to protect anyone."

I sighed and watched her tottering on her feet for a couple yards, cringing at the popping and exploding sounds coming from both ends of the tunnel.

All of a sudden, I felt struck by a momentary flash of brilliance. "Stop," I said. "Let me see that gun."

She refused. "Why."

"I got an idea. You said that thing is powered by electricity, right?"

She shrugged. "And why is that important? Did you find a battery, or were you thinking of undergoing the procedure?"

"I'll show you. Hand me the gun."

She obliged me, but the thing was heavier than an industrial sized chainsaw.

Quickly, I handed it to River. "Here. Hold this and point the metal box towards me."

She stared at me in bafflement, but did what I asked.

I pulled off my shirt, and her expression changed to that of annoyance. "Now really. This is hardly the time or the place-"

When she saw me wad my shirt into a ball and rub it together, she fell silent, staring wide eyed as I touched the fabric to the metal box. Nothing happened.

"I thought that maybe we could use static to power it for a few short bursts," I suggested, trying again. Nothing. I impulsively tried rubbing the shirt against Riversong's uniform, but I still couldn't manage to get a charge.

Riversong sighed and shook her head. "If the Dalek is occupying her skull, and cave woman is using yours, where did they put your brain?"

"Shut up."

She stared at my cuts and scars. "What happened to your chest?"

I put my shirt back on. "It's a long story."

"Wait," said Eve. "You just gave me an idea."

"Another?" Riversong moaned.

"Not to worry. It's good. I have the Dalek brain." She then stared at me with a very serious expression on her face. "What's the least sensitive part of your body?"

That's not a question I get asked very often. "What?" I said.

"Are you afraid of needles?"

I paled. "Why are you asking me these questions?"

Instead of answering, she only muttered, "Your thigh would be a good target, but I'm afraid of what will happen if I hit a major artery..."

Before I could utter a word of protest, she says "Give me your hand."

I unthinkingly comply, and I catch a glimpse of needles coming out of her palm.

It's too late to pull my hand away. She slaps her palm against mine, and I scream as a dozen needles bury themselves into the meat of my hand. In retrospect, I should have suggested she stab my butt.

My pulse shifts in alarming ways as I watch her eyelids flutter. Heat pulses through my wrist. She draws in a shuddering breath that seems almost sexual, then I feel the needles come out.

When she pulled away, I could see a ring of puncture wounds on my skin, and I suddenly felt very faint. I could tell by the bloody welts and the weakness that she had drained my blood, or transfused it somehow. I felt like I had given a pint of blood at the blood bank. The fact that her body hadn't rejected it, and even seemed to make her energetic pointed to her either being a vampire, or having the same blood type. I prayed she was a vampire.

One of the robots had broken through the barricade. Another had opened the door we had intended to pass through. My wife, carefully conserving her energy, destroyed the two with only a couple shots.

"Okay, where's the cell?" I asked her.

She pointed to the end of the hall. "Down there, then right past the Electrical Room. We'll need to cross through Weapons and the Master Control Room."

Riversong paled. "You'll never survive. Look at how weak your husband is."

She was right. I was kind of shuffling down the hall, light headed, and dizzy from the blood drain.

"He was always weak," I heard Eve say. "His sensitive nature is one of his most endearing charms."

Riversong gave her an "oh brother" look, rolling her eyes. 'Never mind." She squinted at a section of wall, frowning at the concrete blocks. "Wait. I see something." She leaned closer. "This area seems familiar." She knelt down in front of a grate, peering through the slats. "Yes! This is it! My cell is straight down at the end!" She stood up, gesturing at it as she grinned at Eve expectantly. "Would you do the honors?"

With a shrug, my wife removed the bolts.

Riversong dived in the vent first. When Eve tried to climb in with the gun, she said it made too much noise.

She set the gun against the wall for a minute, and I think she's going to leave it, but then I suddenly find my shirt being unbuttoned. With a smile, she takes it off and wraps the gun with it, leaving me in goosepimples as I follow her into the vent. Then we were crawling through a long dingy aluminum box.

It wasn't really the straight shot she'd described. And when we crawled to the end of the box, I found myself moving up at an angle and winding around corners.

The tunnel darkened as we crawled ahead. My mind raced with questions. Who was this Riversong person? Who were her parents? Why did she have a stalk in her head instead of the tentacles? What was her relationship to the Doctor? How much did she really know about the TARDIS? Why did she get to be Sarah Connor Chronicles and not my wife?

"River?" I called. "Is the Doctor your father?"

She laughed. "No, he's my husband."

I was about to make a smart elec comment about him dating jail bait, but I refrained. "You're a bit *young* for him." I had to repeat myself due to being behind Eve and the ventilation system.

"He's over three hundred years old! Everyone's too young for him!"

Now I had even more questions, but the blower was too loud for clear conversation.

We crawled through an L joint, and the blower fell silent for a moment. "What about the grown up Riversong?" I shouted.

"What grown up?" she said.

"The one in the cage across from you. The one that looked like the doctor from ER."

"There you go with those strange jokes," said the girl. "It was only us two. Nobody else was in that other cell. How can you look straight into the face of a little girl and say they look like some grownup from a hospital show?"

She was right. Paradoxically, I remembered babbling away to an empty cell while the girl talked to me from the other one. Again, anything was possible with Sarah Connor Jr. Maybe this was what happened when you rescued time travelers.

The blower came back on.

"Just a little further," she told us as I was slowly dragging myself through an elbow joint.

It was then that I heard scuffling sounds behind me.

"What's that?" I said.

"Trust me. You don't want to know. Hurry!"

"Tired," I moaned. "Too weak."

"If I were you, I'd stop being so weak, and quickly. When not devouring dust, the Pipe Cleaners like to supplement their diet with meat!"

"Pipe Cleaners?"

"Don't ask. Just crawl."

"Genetically enhanced lifeforms developed for the sanitation of ventilation ducts," said Eve.

Suddenly I heard a second set of scuffling sounds, this time off to my right.

Down near the end of the pipe, I could see it coming, a dark thing with thousands of lashing tentacles and a single red glowing eye.

We came to a dead stop.

"What's going on!" I shouted in panic.

"Shut up!" I heard two female voices hissing at me. "You'll get us all killed!"

"My cell is straight ahead," I heard Riversong saying. "Keep going. I'll distract them."

As I pass by the girl, she gives me one of these sad goodbye waves and she says a thing that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. "Whether or not you're the Doctor, carry his torch the best you can. Give them hope. I believe in you."

Kneeling on all fours with no shirt with my nipples tingling in the cold air, I felt like anything but a hero. I sighed, unsure how to respond to the statement. "Thank you. For your help. I'm...sorry it had to end like this."

"I'm not! Go!" And she waved me on up ahead.

As I forced myself to crawl hurriedly onwards, I heard her banging the sides of the vents and shouting at the things.

I crawled faster, trying to keep up with my wife, who was already nearing a square of light at the far end.

As the tin box got brighter, I could hear sounds behind me, banging, scuffling, shouting, and then a loud agonized scream.

Ahead, I heard some muttering, and we came to a standstill for an entire minute.

Unable to see anything else ahead of me, I admired how the seams on my wife's outfit curved around her shapely derriere. What was that about dogs and the view never changing? Personally, I figured the view could have been worse.

A moment later, that derriere was backing up, crawling down an adjoining tunnel.

"What are you doing!" I called, but then I saw the little girl. "Don't get caught this time," I scolded.

"What?" she said with a look of bafflement. Little Sarah C apparently didn't know about her bleak torturous future.

I shook my head. "Never mind. Come with me if you want to live." And then I followed the butt down the adjoining passageway. "Where are we going!" I shouted over the blowers.

"You're weak! You need nourishment! This tunnel connects with liquid nutrient storage!"

"A bar?"

"Not exactly. And it's not Slimfast, either."

"Sounds delicious!" I joked as I trailed her.

After an agonizingly long crawl, through shafts, elbow joints and U shaped connections, Eve opened a narrow vent cover beneath her belly.

What happened next was a confusing blur.

Dropping through the hole and doing a monkey swing beneath the vent, (I couldn't see what she was doing), she popped back up with a box full of glass tubes full of white glop. The stuff tasted like stale oatmeal, tofu and beets.

After I had choked down four of these (Eve insisted), and gave four to the little girl, something happened to the vent cover she'd set aside, and the noisy clattering brought an army of screaming robots into the room.

Something explodes, and everything tilts at an angle as the ventilation shaft breaks free from its moorings.


	10. Chapter 10: Dalek Queen

The metal box does a sickening flip, then thunders to the floor with a bone crunching clang. The vials shatter, spraying the remaining oatmeal glop all over the place.  
Fortunately for us, the place where the vent had crashed allowed us enough space to crawl out, and we found ourselves inside the foggy room with the squid incubators.  
The place was indeed as humid as it had looked on the outside, the temperature a womb-like ninety seven or ninety eight degrees that made you feel drowsy.  
The incubators sat bolted to these modular aluminum shelving units you see in electronics labs, and tentacled jellyfish-like creatures pulsated inside their devices, swelling and shrinking as if breathing.  
Although some of them appeared to be in calm slumber, our entrance had not gone unnoticed. I saw hundreds of cyclops eyes opening, glaring at us with a wild fury, their tiny tentacles flapping against the sides of their incubators with the sound of meat slapping together, and one by one I heard them wailing in alarm.  
Eve set down the gun, tossing me my shirt, then, with no hesitation whatsoever, my woman says "shh" and puts her hand on one of the wailers like it's a little girl with a fever.  
To my astonishment, it works, and she silences the others in a similar fashion. I could only stare open mouthed at her actions, quickly coming to the realization that she wasn't my wife anymore.  
As she calms down one of the creatures at the end of the row, I notice a tall white object rolling in front of the aisle. A Dalek. I shout, but to no avail.  
Eve pays it no mind, crooning and smiling as she caresses one of the wiggling things in an incubator.  
The white robot held one of the creatures in a pair of mechanical hands, seemingly prepared to drop it onto one of the nearby racks. It pointed its eyestalk at her, not moving or saying a word.  
Eve ignored it, stroking another one of the creatures.  
The robot was unarmed, but it could have sounded an alert across the whole complex and gotten us killed if it wanted to.  
For some reason, though, it didn't. Instead, I saw it turn its dome, gently depositing its payload into an incubator. A moment later, it rolled away with seeming confidence, like it were pleased with the new candy striper.  
"They're so beautiful," Eve purred as she calmed another. The room had fallen quiet, the voices of the screamers fading, the cyclops eyes falling into heavy lidded slumber.  
"Can we please get out of here?" I hissed.  
She sighed like she were sorry to go, then pointed to a gray door a couple rows down from the one I'd seen the white Dalek go through.  
After Eve cuddled a few more "babies", we reached it, and we were squeezing down an impossibly narrow corridor choked with a myriad of tangled wires. How these robots could go in to repair such things was unclear, except if it were Eve's ultimate purpose.  
As if in answer to my presupposition, I saw Eve reaching into the mess, yanking this and that cord out like she knew what each one did. The lights grew dim, and I heard robotic screaming.  
We turned a corner, and I found myself in Dalek Central.  
The place looked like the war room in some movie. Big computerized displays showed a minute to minute readout of...something on topographic maps, and scores of computer interfaces occupied every inch of wall space in this rounded drum-like room. A lot of the equipment had been rendered inoperative thanks to Eve's meddling, but a few remained flickering brightly in the semi darkness.  
The room was not empty. Two gold Daleks stood poised over the machinery, and a third had left its console to scream at us.  
I thought my wife was going to run, or open fire, but she didn't. Instead she only stood tall before the robot with her hands on her hips, shouting, "Dalek 9161236! Stand down!"  
It screamed at us some more, but she acted unafraid, repeating herself three times in a calm, even tone.  
It should have blasted her, but instead the robot shut up, bowing its eyestalk in submission.  
As I stood silently gawking at her, my wife boldly strode into the room, seating herself in a command chair like she belonged there, and a metal antenna popped out of her neck.  
"This is the Dalek Queen!" she barked. "All units return to your post!" She shot me an apologetic smile.  
"You?" I stammered. "Queen?"  
She shrugged. "Does this please you?"  
I swallowed. "For the time being, yes."  
Eve grinned at me. "Good. Because I am very pleased to have you as my king."  
I approached the throne, leaning close to her ear. "Eve! How long can we safely keep up this charade with no one noticing?"  
"Always and forever!" she said with frightening calm. "It was for this purpose I was made. The Daleks have become destabilized after the loss of Unit 464656 and need new leadership."  
I stepped back a bit, staring at her like she were possessed by the devil. "Why you?"  
"I was the only one who completed treatment with my personality still intact. I had the strength of will, the determination, and the physical strength of an Amazon. I was the ideal specimen of what a Dalek human hybrid should be."  
I shuddered, slumping against a wall.  
"This displeases you."  
"Eve," I whispered. "I don't like it here. I don't want to live here. I want to go home."  
I felt Riversong clamp her hand around my arm, silently agreeing with me by huddling close.  
"I have no home," Eve said quietly. "But I feel a sense of belonging here." She straightened in her chair. "And you can too if you try. We can live here together. Start our family. We even have a daughter." And she smiled lovingly at Riversong.  
"I don't want to live here!" the girl nearly screamed.  
The Daleks looked like they were about to train their laser cannons on her for a quick barbecue.  
"What upsets you, dear? Name your problem and I swear I will do my best to fix it."  
"You can't." The girl's breathing was shallow. She paced the room like a caged animal. The eyestalks of the robots followed her as she circled the throne.  
"Mom and dad hated the Daleks! They did so much evil in the world and here you are snuggling up to them like it's no big deal! Well it is a big deal!"  
Eve sighed. 'Dear, do you remember the Doctor? How he nearly wiped all the Daleks out of existence with explosives, but didn't? Do you remember any of the stories at all? Riversong, honey, he loved the Daleks. He just acted like he didn't."  
The girl started crying. "I'm so confused!"  
Eve held out her arms, and Riversong ran to her, accepting her embrace as she wept on her shoulder.  
"The last thing the Doctor wanted to do was eliminate our species. He just didn't know we were capable of love."  
"Then what about the Time War?" she said quietly.  
"Did you ever notice the look of anguish on the man's face? So much sadness, on account of the hurt he did to us. He didn't want to. He really didn't. Just like I really didn't want to kill Dalek 875456 or 4654564 or even 4545469."  
Riversong cried again. "It's like you know him. But you can't know him. You were just born yesterday."  
Eve patted her back. "I've studied the recordings. The Time War hurt him a lot."  
Eventually the girl calmed down, staring at the robots. "They're not going to kill us, are they?"  
"No dear," Eve cooed. "After all, they're family. 777845 and 678979 really aren't so bad once you get to know them."  
I saw all three eyestalks pointing down at the floor. Could the mere mention of their names in a positive light stir up buried emotions in these mechanical mutants? Were they crying inside? Praying? I couldn't tell. Their eyestalks raised again, fixing on their alleged queen.  
"Can you contact the TARDIS?" I asked.  
She shrugged. "I could, but what then?"  
"Well," I said. "You could tell it to come back so I can go home!"  
I heard an edge creep into her voice. "We are home, honey."  
"No we're not."  
"Honey, let's not fight."  
"Please. Call the TARDIS."  
She pushed a button on her chair. "Unit 7016123. Come in."  
I heard static.  
"Unit 7016123. Respond." She shrugged. "I don't know what 7016123 is doing."  
She tried again. "7016123. This is the queen. Respond."  
Long pause.  
"I ACKNOWLEDGE NO QUEEN!" it barked.  
The eyestalks of the Daleks at the consoles turned to us expectantly.  
"Unit 7016123. You will be disciplined," she said with a commanding voice.  
The static returned.  
We were left unharmed. Apparently 7016123 wasn't that high in their hierarchy.  
"I'm hungry," said Riversong. "All I've had are those test tubes of stuff."  
"I'm sorry, that is our main source of nourishment at this compound. Other food supplies at this location have largely spoiled due to age. However, I will see if 4531855 can locate something suitable."  
Oddly enough, our new home, this Dalek place, had showers, an eating area, and a bed. Eve said they were leftovers from the Khaled and Dal scientists who used to live there a long time ago, and they looked the part. Everything had a thick layer of dust, which we had to clear off with vacuums before anything became livable. The water came from filtered reservoirs, and our meals were basically the same oatmeal glop that we had before. "Something suitable" turned out to be some old cans of unidentifiable freeze dried meat substance, and something that looked and tasted like Clif bars. The glop was better.  
In a few hours, we all recovered our strength, and I resigned myself to my new life as sort of a servant/housewife to my queen, busying myself with tidying the place up to avoid going mad while my wife commanded the robots to repair our damages, dismantle weapons, and, oddly enough, garden.  
I had once thought of the Daleks as mindless killing machines, but they didn't fight us removing their laser cannons. She spoke to them like people, and these robots seemed to love it.  
I followed her around as she supervised the operations, overseeing repairs, settling disputes with the parties that fought us, then, of all things, she taught them how to arts and crafts, like using their lasers to carve murals on the wall, or etching patterns on their shells. There were even plans to make miniature beds so the blob things inside the shell could crawl out and sleep in comfort. She taught them to be independent, how to be free. I don't know how much of it sunk in, but she tried.  
Becoming weary, we retired to the bedrooms, I and Eve in one room, Riversong in a room by herself.  
While Eve tucked her in and read her a story, I took a shower. The place seemed to have serviced a wide range of people, so after bathing I quickly found fresh clothing, some silky chrome colored briefs that really weren't my style, a cream colored jumpsuit like Eve wore, and a pair of boots that actually fit.  
As I'm laying clothed in my old military style bed under a fine layer of silky silver sheets, my wife peels off her jumpsuit, proudly displaying her shiny chrome underwear.  
She smiled at me, but I didn't smile back. While her clean, muscular body looked stunning in those gleaming undergarments, my eyes kept returning to the Dalek's butcher job. I sighed.  
She frowned. "What's the matter?"  
"I could have saved you. I wish I had that TARDIS thing so I could go back and make things right."  
She laid down on top of my cover. "It's okay. I knew you were weak when I first found you."  
"But I'm a man!" I stammered. "I should have done something."  
She chuckled. "You sound just like Heglock the Strong." She flexed her muscles mockingly. "Strong man! Woman weak! Man save woman!" Woman stay in cave and cook!" She giggled. "Come to think about it, he had a lot of similarities to Cookie Monster!"  
"So, what, you like sensitive guys?" I said.  
She nodded. 'You reminded me of Lugunk the Weaver, who was bitten by a poisonous snake, and Keglump, the man of flowers, who fell off the edge of Bone Chasm while running from Demon Tooth. I knew you were weak. I knew I had to grab you immediately, to protect you, so you could be mine."  
As she spoke, I saw tentacles wiggling out the sides of her panties. I cringed.  
"You were about to die. I saved you."  
She made it sound like she bought me. I was okay with that, under other circumstances, but she had been weirding me out all day. Just looking at that cyclops eye and hair tentacles put me in a deep depressed funk.  
"So you just dragged me by the hair and had your way with me."  
She seated herself on my legs, sliding her hand up the sheets. "You didn't seem to mind."  
I gawked at her. "You've...saved other men?"  
She shrugged. "Let's just say I never let a man drag me by the hair." She tugged on the zipper of my jumpsuit. "Better?"  
I swallowed, unable to put together the right words.  
"C'mon," she said. "I want to see that sexy ivory white skin again."  
"Was that really why you married me?"  
She shrugged. "Maybe part of the reason! And your face! Oh, I had never seen a man of your age with such a clean shaven face before. Like a baby! As you can probably tell, the people of the Zedwa don't have anything remotely close to razors."  
Yes, an astounding pronouncement from Lady Bigfoot. "No!" I said in mock surprise.  
I glanced down at her legs. "If you like it so much, why don't *you* shave?"  
She looked genuinely shocked. "Me? Why would I do that?" It only looks good on you. Some have tried, but it's not pretty."  
I rolled my eyes and let the topic drop. She pulled my zipper down further, squeezing me between her knees.  
The atmosphere really didn't put me in the mood. I shook my head, patting the spot next to me. With a sigh, she settled into my arms. "What else is wrong?"  
"I dunno," I said. "It's this whole place. How can I relax when I'm surrounded by robots with death ray arms?"  
"We removed those, remember?"  
"Most of them. Some of them still have laser cannons."  
"I can take care of them for you," she smiled.  
"It's still damn creepy. It reminds me of Maximillion and those corpse cyborgs in the Black Hole movie."  
"I'm sorry. I missed that one. What's the point?"  
I gave her a general synopsis of the film.  
She sighed and shook her head. "We can make this place our home, Robert," she said. "You'll get used to it. You'll see."  
But I wasn't so sure about that.  
Ever determined to ease my tension, she straddled the covers, wiggling seductively above my stomach. "Oh Robert..." she called in a sing-song voice. "Look what I can do!"  
And then I see tentacles tugging down the waistband of her panties.  
"Look! No hands!"  
They were down around her thighs when I heard a little girl's voice saying, "Excuse me."  
I saw all three of my wife's eyes widen in shock. Her drawers came back up in a split second, without the use of a single finger.  
Needless to say, I was relieved at the interruption. Well, mostly relieved.  
"I'm scared, Eve," Riversong was saying. "Can I sleep with you?"  
Kids don't know how bad that sounds, but I admired the innocence.  
For once in the entire history of this type of thing happening, it was the female who was annoyed at the intrusion.  
The moment I saw her in the cell, I had decided that this girl had nobody, so whenever I got her free, someone would have to be her guardian. Since no one else was present to do the job, I felt obligated. For awhile I kept thinking that she was actually the product of my loins, but then I asked at dinner and she said it was some people named Roary and Amy. When I inquired further, she said it was a long story, and I assumed the Daleks had gotten them. The adoption papers were going to be fun.  
At any rate, I declared her my daughter for all intents and purposes, so when she said she was scared, I told her, "Me too, honey. Come here." And the three of us cuddled together under the sheets and went to sleep.  
Near the early hours of dawn, or the time in which my unconscious brain had reached its deepest phase of REM sleep, I feel Riversong wiggling out of the covers, muttering something about a drink of water. Thinking it an ordinary and safe enough activity, I rolled over and tried to sleep.  
I had only closed my eyes a minute when I heard the little girl screaming.  
I sat bolt upright, and my woman tried to pull me back down.  
"Go back to sleep honey," she purred. "They're just taking her to processing."  
It was then that I knew that things had gone horribly wrong.

My little girl Riversong was screaming. I knew it was a bad idea to sleep in a giant warehouse full of killer robots, but my wife the Dalek Queen had deceived me into being complacent with her gardening and shiny silver underwear.  
In the unstable world that had become my memory, I suddenly remembered speaking to an adult version of my adopted daughter, one with a giant eye in her forehead, tentacles poking out of her curly locks. The line about ER still didn't make any sense.  
"DQ" tried to keep me in bed with her, but I squirmed out of her iron grip, running out the door in search of the girl.  
I found her several feet down the hallway outside, weeping with fright as a gant of robots with laser guns, miniature circular saws and pointy drills forced her on a death march.  
"Hey!" I yelled. "Stop!"  
Their eyestalks turned to me for a moment, paused, then turned indifferently back to their victim.  
I had to do something.  
Riversong couldn't help herself.  
Eve wasn't going to help me.  
If anyone was going to rescue her, it would have to be me.  
The corridor didn't present me with any useful weapons. Some wires I could possibly get electrocuted with if I yank them, some little chunks of debris that would only bounce off, a couple soft pieces of scrap aluminum that would get me killed before I could make use of them...  
And so I get the bright idea of pulling one of their guns off.  
It's harder than it looks.  
After failing at that, I twist and I pull and I fiddle with one of the black spheroids built into a robot's shell, but nothing works. Yeah, I know. Brilliant. At least I tried.  
A second later, I see a flash, my heart stops, and I collapse on the floor.


	11. Chapter 11: Type 39 TARDIS

When I awoke, I found myself being dragged by my hair through a place that looked like a quarry. A glimpse of hairy female legs and a blinding reflection of sunlight on chrome colored panties told me I had been rescued by my crazy wife.  
When I noticed a tiny suited figure walking alongside her, I glanced that way and decided all was right with the world. Right-ish. I was alive, Riversong was alive, and she only had two eyelids. The laser cannon was cradled in her arms, but she seemed to be carrying it okay.  
I grabbed at my wife's hands and she let go, smiling at me.  
"I thought I lost you," I smiled.  
"I thought I did too." I stared at the piles of rocks. The quarry seemed to go on for miles in all directions. And me without any shoes.  
"You were right about the black hole," she sighed.  
It was a hollow victory. "It'd be nice if I wasn't. Are we safe?"  
She shrugged. "We're out in Sector A65B-33-4, and I blocked the exit with a rock slide. I think we'll be all right. It's not like they can fly or anything."  
The thought made me uneasy, but it calmed me to hear the Queen of the Daleks report that that Daleks couldn't fly. If the damned things actually could fly, we would have been in serious trouble.  
Riversong wrinkled her face as she stared at the half naked figure standing above me. "You need some clothes."  
Eve only shrugged. "I didn't have time to dress." With a grin, she added, "You should have seen what I had on before this!"  
And then she must have noticed me staring at her cleavage, because then she was cinching her bra up higher and winking at me with her big cyclops eye.  
I got up and brushed myself off, pretending to be searching the quarry for...anything survival related. "Was I dead?"  
"No. Stunned." She stuck out her arm. "Hand."  
I unthinkingly obeyed, wincing as needles stabbed through puncture wounds that were just beginning to heal.  
After she'd `vamped' me for a bit, she let go, marching barefoot across the sharp and jagged rocks.  
I followed her.  
The rocks cut my feet, but what was I to do? I had stupidly tried to make myself comfortable in bed, and I had the nerve to chase after my adopted daughter without stopping for my boots.  
"Where are we going?"  
"To where you wanted to go."  
"Where *I* wanted? What about you? Don't you want to see what it's like out there? Don't you want to live in a world free of killer robots? Away from where they stick...(I didn't want to offend her with words like `ugly') creatures in your skull?"  
"I want to be where our son is," she said quietly.  
I could have fainted. "Your what?"  
"Our son. He's back there. With them."  
"No!" I moaned. "Please no!"  
She dropped to her knees on the painfully sharp rocks and wept.  
Out of obligation, I held her close, trying to comfort her, but I had none to give her.  
I pictured a young boy about Riversong's age. A companion. A playmate. Maybe, sometime when he got older, something more.  
Imagine my relief when she said, "Yes, Robert. While I was on the table, they stole my fertilized eggs."  
I started breathing normally again. "So...there's no little John Connor that needs rescuing? There's just an egg, right?"  
"Yes," she sniffed. "But it's fertilized. Did you really want to name him John?"  
I smacked my head. "Look. I know that life begins at conception and all that, but he doesn't even have le-" That reminded me of another thing that bothered me about the whole thing. "How did you know it's a boy?"  
She shrugged, wiping her face. "How do they know what's in those other test tubes is a Dalek?"  
"Genetics," I said.  
She nodded.  
I sighed. "Look. We can fertilize other eggs. It's not even a fetus yet, is it?"  
"No."  
"Well then." Technically I was off the hook. I breathed an even heavier sigh of relief.  
She clutched the top of my jumpsuit with a terrified expression on her face. "But don't you see? They could use our DNA to create some horrible abomination!"  
I thought about saying we didn't need any help in that department, we already made one, but I held my tongue, silently staring at her.  
"I'm not talking about just one! They could make an army of soldiers with that DNA! Thousands of...mutant things, all with your face!"  
"Our faces," I corrected.  
She wept on my chest. "What do we do?"  
"Relax," I said. "They'll have an army of soldiers that can't do math, can't hold a job, and can't get the nerve to ask someone to the prom." I frowned. "And may be kill a dinosaur with a pair of scissors."  
I plopped down on a boulder. "Even so, they will be too moody to enjoy their victory. They'll probably commit suicide before attempting any invasion."  
Eve frowned at me. "What are you trying to say?"  
I rolled my eyes. "All I'm saying is, your bad decision might just save the universe. I'd like to see them try to use my DNA!"  
"Gee, thanks." At least she wasn't crying, I thought.  
She stood up. "Let's go."  
And so I followed her.  
"I'm tired," Riversong moaned. "Here. Take your gun back."  
Eve slung it over her shoulder, stomping carelessly over the jagged rocks.  
The little girl smiled at me. "That was really brave of you back there."  
"Thanks, kid."  
"And really stupid."  
"That too."  
She sighed. "You remind me of Roary."  
"Really? How so?"  
She shrugged.  
"How did he die? Did a Dalek kill him?"  
"No, it was...the Weeping Angels."  
"What are those?"  
"Spolers," she said with a smirk.  
I wasn't sure what was being spoiled. "So, what, they're a biker gang or something?"  
She gave me this look like I were stupid. "Be glad you've never met them," she said.  
All of a sudden, my wife silently set down her gun, motioning us back with one hand as she drew a sharp piece of scrap metal out of her bra with the other.  
I caught a glimpse of something like a snake disappearing behind a bounder, then watched as mutant cavegirl quietly stalked barefooted across the gravel in her shiny underwear like a character in some late night B movie.  
In a bound, she leapt across the boulder, and as the snake thing reared up to strike her, I heard her let out a feral scream, slamming the knife down in a spray of black blood.  
The combatants fell behind the boulder.  
The silence that followed worried me, so, fearing the worst, I followed, only to find mutant cavegirl peeling the skin off the thing's carcass.  
I don't know what it was she killed, but it looked like a rattlesnake and a giant centipede had an overgrown baby together.  
The thing had a head like a cobra, and she'd severed that part from the body.  
"I removed the poison sacs," she said as she peeled more skin back. "We only need a fire and it'll be ready."  
I frowned at the pile of rocks that surrounded me. 'and how, pray tell, do we do that? I don't see any sticks, do you Riversong/"  
The child shook her head.  
"I smell petrol fumes. Some of these rocks are semi flammable so you should be able to coat them with the stuff to make coals. There are also dry plants growing behind some other boulders."  
A short foot injuring walk on some sharp stones led to a giant pool of black sludge. It didn't smell so good, like hot asphalt and burning tires, but I dipped the rocks in it anyway, piling them next to our kill.  
I also found the dry plant she mentioned, a sort of tumbleweed with eyes, but its thorns cut me every time I tried to pull one up.  
When I told her about it, I expected advice on how to grab them, but instead she just yanked it out of the ground with her bare hands, throwing it on the rock pile. "Here," she said, handing me the piece of metal and a flinty looking rock. "Start the fire."  
I stared at her. "Who told you I was in Scouts?"  
"What?"  
I shook my head. "Never mind."  
I knelt by the alien tumbleweed, striking sparks into it until I had tiny glowing embers. The knotted structure of the plant was ideal for tinder, and with a little blowing, it smoked and burned, only growing dim when my woman dropped a pile of tumbleweed things on top of it.  
The rocks caught fire, releasing a cloud of black smoke that made me gag, then the semi flammables caught, lighting up like Kingsford briquettes.  
An hour passed, and we were eating alien snake-apede jerky.  
It wasn't that good. The stuff tasted like doughy undercooked sausage, old brussel sprouts and the flavorless lump of gristle you often find in a block of cheap ham. I ate until I was full, but only because I was starved and there wasn't any pepperoni supreme pizza snakes laying around.  
The robots apparently couldn't move without a smooth level surface, so we ate in unmolested silence.  
The sun went down, and Eve found us a cramped little animal burrow (its deadly owner lay dead on a nearby rock-breakfast) and the three of us got in and curled up together to keep warm.  
For three days, we existed similarly, eating nasty snake-apedes, drinking the ooze from plants, and sleeping in animal burrows (that was murder on my back). One day, we didn't even go out on account of the acid rain.  
On the fourth day, Eve pulled me in front of a giant pointy pillar of rock, calling it a Type 39 TARDIS.  
"It's a rock," I said. "It looks like something that would be standing in a Utah valley somewhere."  
She brushed an area of the rock clean, placing her palm against it, and a square piece of the mineral slid open, revealing a circular panel that looked best suited for interaction with a toilet plunger.  
She placed her hand on it, turning it around like a combination lock, then jerked her hand back just seconds before two metal panels tried to guillotine slice her wrist into a toilet plunger handle.  
The rock obelisk let out a rumbling moan, throwing small stones and gravel down on us as its surface split open like a shale outcrop on the San Andreas fault line. I'm not sure if that mineral exists on the fault, but you get the idea.  
The crack widened into the shape of a door, and I was again looking into a console room.  
This one looked like an antique. The fittings were all in brass, and the lights seemed to be dying, the controls all designed to resemble the old style dials and levers the guy used in that H.G. Wells Time Machine movie I saw on TV awhile back. The inverted Frisbee things in this model provided very little illumination, being the color of old gold, and there was a layer of thick dust covering everything.  
The moment I stepped through the door, I wanted to step back out again.  
There were two Daleks, one on either side of the console, and they had the appearance of battle tanks.  
I relaxed when I saw the cobwebs. If these things were alive, I thought, they obviously aren't the most active robots on the planet. They should have at least exterminated the bugs.  
My woman casually strolled into the room, placing her hands on a pair of circular console panels. They glowed blue, and the big plastic column in the center of the device started glowing and rising up and down.  
The lights got brighter, and I heard the grinding of machinery and air conditioner equipment kicking on.  
"Dalek 47 report!" Eve barked.  
No answer.  
"Dalek 48 report!"  
I waved a hand in front of one of their eyestalks.  
"48 REPORTS UNSUCCESSFUL COMBAT WITH ARACHNID," I mocked.  
When I saw the bulbs on its dome flicker like the top of a child's light up fire truck with a loose wire, I jumped back and shut up, but the thing wasn't moving.  
I led the little girl up to the console, then picked her up in my arms when I noticed the kid couldn't see anything.  
"You know something about this thing, don't you, kid?"  
"A little," she said. "It looks a little different, but-" She pointed to a crank and a set of dials. "I think that controls the time period." She pointed to some switches and levers. "And those are planetary controls..." She flipped a switch, and a section of one of the walls slid open, revealing a monitor displaying the world outside. "And somewhere around here is the-"  
"STA-TUS," a mechanical voice groaned at what seemed like a speed of 25 RPM. "RE-PORT. TEM-PORAL FLUX COM-PO-NENT DAM-AGED. PLACED ON STAND-BY TO AWAIT RE-PAIRS."  
"HUMANOID UNITS," the other croaked. "IDENTIFY YOURSELF."  
"Dalek Queen 3 and prisoners, sent here for repairs. Dalek 47, state mission objective."  
"REPAIR TARD-IS AND RE-TURN TO STRA-TE-GIC LO-CA-TION 5455-5477-85289 IN SEC-TOR 5186-15-4562189 TO DE-STROY BE-ING KNOWN AS GEORGE WASH-ING-TON."  
The other robot said, "TO WIN THE TIME WAR AND DESTROY ALL TIME LORDS."  
"Right!" I said with an uneasy smirk. "Now that we're all on the same page...how do we get this thing to work?"  
"We can't," Eve said. "We don't have a temporal flux component."  
With a sigh, I set the girl down. "So we need a flux capacitor or it won't go."  
"It's a temporal flux component, but yes."  
I slumped on the floor. "Great. We're stuck here. Now what?"  
"Now?" Eve smiled. "Now we go home."  
"No!" Riversong shouted, pressing herself against me in a tight little ball. She curled her arm around mine, clutching it tightly as she folded her legs to her chest, squeezing herself between me and the console.  
"Honey," my wife said to her. "You don't want to live in this little cave for the rest of your life, do you?"  
"It's not a cave, it's a TARDIS."  
"I used a metaphor."  
"I know. If this is a cave, the place back there is a tomb. I don't want to go back. At least here I can go outside."  
"You can go outside all you want back there." She knelt beside her, smiling. "All of Skaro is ours, honey. But if you want to live here, we can live here. This is your home too. We'll just be...camping!"  
Riversong relaxed somewhat. "Okay."  
I frowned. "We're stranded here, aren't we?"  
Eve nodded sadly. "I'm sorry. We don't have TARDIS production facilities at our base."  
"Are there others?"  
She shook her head. "The Doctor destroyed them all. With Davros and our human leaders overthrown, the surviving units gathered together at Site B26A51E84 and tried to rebuild society from the ashes."  
"Who is Davros?"  
"A misunderstood genius." She stood up. "The Type 39 is not as impressive as the 40, but it has a kitchen and sleeping quarters. Anyone for lunch?"  
Riversong slowly stood up. "Wait. I think we can fix the TARDIS." She pointed to a panel on the side of the console. "Open this, please."  
Eve humored her, removing the bolts, and the girl pulled the panel off, disappearing inside the machinery.  
She was gone for several minutes, tossing wires, silver cubes and metal circuit boards all over the floor as she rooted around.  
My wife took this opportunity to attempt getting me out of my spacesuit, and I almost let her had I not heard the girl calling to her.  
I noticed that she had found a tool kit somewhere within the compartment, and one of her hands clutched the silver socket wrench-like thing she called a sonic screwdriver.  
We stopped kissing to stare at her as she cautiously poked one of the robots. "Can I take a look inside this one? For parts?"  
Eve climbed out of my lap, smiling at her. "Of course you can, honey." And she strolled up to the Dalek, placing a hand on its shell.  
I heard the thing groaning something about resenting being used for scrap parts, but it was in a tone of resignation.  
"Dalek 47, we require your assistance. We believe we can help accomplish your objective to destroy Washington if we can remove a part from your vehicle. Will you do this for the glory of all Daleks?"  
After a minute's delay, it bowed its eyestalk and said, "YES, MY QUEEN."  
"I will hold you," she said, offering her arms.  
After a long delay, the eyestalk raised. The dome elevated, and the front of the machine unfolded to reveal a tentacled creature surrounded by tiny pieces of computer equipment, life support devices, and a myriad of miniature controls.  
Below this little space pod of sorts, I could see the heart of the machine, wires, batteries, a motor, and a lot of other machinery I couldn't guess the purpose of.  
My woman gently placed her hands in the space pod, and the creature crawled up her arm.  
With care, she brought the thing to her bosom and held it like a newborn baby, gesturing for Riversong to do her examination of the device.  
She quickly did so, peering into the inner workings, tugging wires and pulling things out.  
The thing clutched to Eve's chest jerked violently in response, but she cooed and petted it, and the thing closed its eye.  
Riversong pulled some wires and cylinders out of the shell, disappearing inside the console again.  
My wife offered me the creature. "Would you like to pet him?"  
Pushing away my squeamishness, I put my hand on the creature, stroking its squid body. It was as pleasant as petting an eel. "You think if we had kids, they'd look like that?"  
She grinned. "Gee, I hope so!"  
I rolled my eyes. All this snuggling up with the Daleks made me want to dump her somewhere and go home, or jump ship at the next available safe...whatever, and leave her with the robots.  
Seriously, I had no good reason to stay with her now. Sure, we slept together outside wedlock, so we're kind of obligated to each other in that respect, and we did have the marital scarification, but she didn't even remotely resemble the girl I married. As I watched her cuddle the creature like a baby, I formulated plans for abandoning her, taking the little girl and going away somewhere. Someplace safe and normal.  
But then I got to feeling guilty about letting the Daleks operate on her brain, and burying her dad, and I thought back to all we went through together, and I kinda felt obligated to stick with her.  
Plus that silver underwear really looked good on her.  
"I'm going to fix 47's chariot," she said, holding the Dalek creature out to me. "Here. Hold him."  
I didn't really like the idea of holding a one eyed squid creature to my chest, especially one that probably wanted to rip my face off, but I figured the key to handling any deadly animal was to show no fear, so I picked up the nasty thing and held it to my chest, kind of cradling it in my arms while Eve worked on its metal shell.  
I just stared in disgust at the creature, and it stared balefully at me.  
After about five or ten minutes of this, the creature got bored and fell asleep.  
When Eve saw me, she gave me this look like I was the greatest father in the world, which really embarrassed and sickened me.  
With a grin, she connected a few wires and held out her arms. "You can hand him back now."  
"What, and wake Junior?" I remarked with sarcasm. I handed the thing back double quick.  
"So, what, you can fix those Dalek machines, but you can't fix a TARDIS?"  
"Exactly." And Eve put the creature back in its little compartment.  
Its shell closed and the thing didn't do anything for a long time.  
"What did you do to it?"  
She shrugged. "The motivator and voice modules were taken to replace components in the TARDIS. I just reconnected the life support systems and enabled other auxiliary operations."  
The lights on the robot flashed on and off like it were speaking.  
"Please tell me you disconnected the firing system."  
She looked at me like I were crazy. "Then how would we kill George Washington?"  
I smacked my face. "George Washington is the founding father of (I wanted to say `our country', but, frankly, it wasn't hers)...America. My country. Now, Eve, I'm very fond of America, and I don't like the idea of someone coming along and vaporizing George before my constitutional rights have been established."  
She rolled her eyes. "I know who George Washington is, Robert."  
"Then do you know who Hitler is? Because if you're going to wipe out one of the founders of a notoriously free country, you're probably going to have a totalitarian state where they execute people for having political opinions."  
She silently stared at me for a few minutes.  
At last she said, "One time Qardug spoke words that brought the curse of evil down upon our village. He was stoned to death. When he died, the curse was lifted."  
I was understandably disgusted. "So that's a good thing to you? You think it's some great thing for a person to get shot and killed for just saying words?"  
She swallowed. "One time Rinarg and Wiungab were challenging each other for hunting and water rights. Wiungab said those rights belong to everyone, but Rinarg did not agree. Instead of discussing it rationally, Rinarg poisoned him to death. It was a cowardly way to solve the problem."  
"And what are these Daleks doing, exactly?"  
She gave me a nervous sidelong glance. "You don't understand. This is different."  
"How so? They're going to vaporize any species that isn't a Dalek, aren't they?"  
She frowned. "Maybe?"  
"And you don't think that's wrong."  
Eve sighed. "Robert, it's just one man."  
"Yeah? Then why do I have the sneaking suspicion that someone else is going to wipe out Jefferson and all the other signers of the constitution?"  
"It's fixed," said a voice behind me.  
I frowned at her. "What do you think, Riversong? They want to kill President Washington. Don't you think that's wrong?"  
She nodded. "That's like killing the Queen! You can't do that!"  
Oh you limey, I thought. But I smiled.  
"Riversong, dear," Eve said. "Don't you want to live in a world with no racism, no disagreements? Don't you want to eliminate all differences so we can all be the same and live in harmony together?"  
She saw right through the attempt. "No."  
Eve petted her on the head. "We're all tired. We should sleep on it."  
That sounded like the best idea I heard all day, and so I set about exploring the T39 in search of a bed.  
The place wasn't all that much bigger on the inside. A narrow hall led down to a pair of tiny bedrooms, and bathrooms connected to them. There was a kitchen, a room Eve described as a recharging room for the Daleks' chariots, a storage room and a hydroponics section to provide air. That was it.  
The food in the freezer was flavorless and canned. We had the oatmeal stuff, some spam like canned meat and something that tasted like vegetable matter, presumably supplying lacking vitamins.  
When we retired to our beds, Eve tried to get me out of my spacesuit, but again, to my relief, Riversong got scared, so we just squished together the best we could on the narrow mattress.  
Riversong wrinkled her nose and said I stank, so I tried out the shower.  
Daleks, or whoever it was that owned the thing, did not have our standard shampoo, just some sort of hand soap of some sort, and the water pressure sucked, but I made do.  
I had just rinsed the soap out of my eyes when I noticed a naked body kissing and pressing up against me, and I felt something like mass of wiggling snakes engulfing my manhood. It was like getting a lap dance from an octopus.  
I should have been disgusted, but my body had other ideas. I slid down to the shower floor, letting her do whatever she wanted with her tentacles, obliging her with my body whenever it seemed appropriate.  
We made a lot of noise as we had sex in the spray. I can't imagine what the little girl thought about all this, but I guess she probably covered her head with a pillow or something.  
The ugly cyclops eye was a turn off, but I had gotten used to it, and I thought the hair tentacles were kind of cute and played with them as we kissed.  
What I couldn't handle so well were other things, like, how sticky suction cups suddenly popped out of her tailbone area and raised in an arc around the curve of her buttocks, and how, as we neared climax, a long row of little mouths popped open from her neck to crotch, erupting in small tentacles and suckers.  
I tried to make myself think they were aloe vera or cactus in tiny pots. In fact, I said it quite a few times out loud, which made her laugh.  
I laughed too, but when we passed the point of no return, it wasn't so funny.  
Immediately, as we reached the inevitable, I felt something like teeth clamping down around the base of my genitals. I screamed, thinking she was going to...cut it off.  
I thought for sure I'd be spending the rest of my life as an eunuch, but then, whatever it was just stayed there.  
"Sorry," she giggled.  
"It's all right," I groaned.  
And then some sticky green liquid gushed all over my lap.  
I fell flat on the shower floor.  
I had to shower again to get all that stuff off of me, and then I washed my hands again. Touching the suckers on her butt was like touching the back of a slug. I had to wash my hands three and four times to get the sticky sludge off of them, and even after all that my hands still felt sticky.  
When we dried and got dressed again (I had to convince Eve to put on a jumpsuit), I found Riversong sitting on the bed, staring at an instruction manual.  
"What's an aloe vera cactus?" she asked.  
I blushed. "You don't want to know."  
"It helps daddy to think of plants when we're trying to make babies," Eve grinned.  
The girl looked disgusted as I was embarrassed. I changed the subject. "Are you sleepy, hon?"  
She nodded.  
"C'mon, then." I crawled into the bed, and she got in with me, my wife sandwiching her from the other side.  
The bed really wasn't designed for that. Twice during the night, I rolled off the single person bed, falling on the floor.  
Once, when Riversong had left for the bathroom, I found my hand resting on those disgusting suction cups, the clothes apparently not to my woman's liking.  
And then, toward what felt like the early hours of dawn, as I felt myself reaching the most comfortable levels of unconsciousness, I suddenly noticed the whole room shaking. That, combined with the disturbing sensation of not being in danger of falling off the bed, caused my eyes to fly wide open.  
I jumped out of bed, threw on the boots I swore I would never go anywhere without, and bolted to the console room.  
My worst suspicions were confirmed.  
One of the Daleks was missing, and the front doors of the TARDIS were wide open, overlooking a room bearing a striking similarity to the Oval Office of the White House.  
It looked like a log cabin. The flag was the old kind with thirteen stars. The Presidential Crest was painted on the floor, because old Betsy wouldn't have been able to sow a huge eagle for people to step all over like they did later. It didn't look like any of the pictures I'd seen, but then a lot of stuff I'd experienced didn't match up with the history books.  
In the center of the room, a charred skeleton in colonial garb lay slumped over a large wooden desk. Dalek 48 had literally blown off his wig.  
My wife stood on one side of the desk, clad only in her chrome underwear, with those radio antennas poking out the sides of her neck.  
"This is the Dalek Queen," she said with an air of pride. "Objective 15-C6146M accomplished!"


	12. Chapter 12: It's All About The Benjamin

The first president of the United States had just been murdered by a Dalek. All that remained was a blackened skeleton, a charred ruff shirt, knickers, and the most hideous pair of dentures I'd ever seen. He lay facedown on a pile of papers, which I presumed to be drafts of the U.S. Constitution.  
I couldn't say with absolute certainty that it was the first president of America. The thirteen star flag and the logo on the floor didn't help me determine a year, because I didn't study that much, and the Daleks may have messed up history already. The papers, I found upon closer examination, were not the constitution at all, but battle maps. The seal on the floor, I noticed, was a rudimentary version of the usual eagle symbol, missing a few arrows, and its claws were bent the wrong way.  
I remembered seeing a drawing of the president's first base of operations, and it looked like a hotel, not a log cabin. My guess was this was the guy's summer home.  
His face was too badly destroyed for me to hold up a penny for facial comparison, but the Daleks had killed someone suspiciously like the president.  
The robot stood motionless before its victim, the lights on its dome flickering.  
Nearby, my mutant wife reported a victory to Dalek Command.  
She had deceived me. She told me to sleep over it. She took advantage of the male tendency to sleep after sex, and she had brought the TARDIS here to carry out her death mission.  
I glanced back and saw Riversong standing between the two open doors of an armoire. The TARDIS was no longer a rock. It appeared to have that chameleon function I read about.  
I waved her back inside. "Stay there! It's not safe!"  
She nodded, backing up.  
I felt like diving back in there with her and closing the doors, letting the police or whoever it was drag Eve away to prison, but I was stupid and in love, I guess, so I didn't.  
I turned to face the killer.  
"Dammit, Eve!" I shouted. "That was the founding father of our country! He was supposed to be crawling out a whore's window and dying of pneumonia or syphilis. Why couldn't you leave things alone!"  
"Your country," she said. "It means nothing to me."  
"Well, unlike you, I don't particularly like tyranny and oppression! You've ruined everything!"  
"Whores and syphilis. He sure sounds like a great guy." She casually pried a gold ring off the president's dead fingers, staring at it. "What's this?"  
She threw it to me. I almost dropped it out of disgust, but I caught it before it fell to the floor, examining it closely.  
A compass and sextant had been skillfully poured or inlaid on the surface of a small jewel, which fit with what I knew about the founding fathers. "It's his Freemasonry ring."  
"What's that?"  
Before I could answer, I saw a flash, and Dalek 48's dome exploded.  
"Whoa!" My eyes whipped to the open door at the end of the room, where a man who looked like Uncle Fester with glasses held up a contraption built out of a Dalek laser cannon, furiously cranking a lever on the side like it were a jack in the box.  
The enormous paunch, the vest, the frizz of gray hair, it all reminded me strangely of the face on the one hundred dollar bill. I quickly raised my hands in surrender.  
"Hey! Benjamin Franklin! Don't shoot! I'm unarmed!"  
He ignored me.  
I jumped in front of Eve just seconds before Ben fired the cannon at her.  
As I hit the floor and felt my heart stop, my last thought was "again?"  
Then I felt a slight tremble as my woman fell to the floor behind me.  
I came to in a jail cell. I figured Ben's major offensive against Dalek 48 had required a lot of cranking and he hadn't been able to crank fast enough to add us to the blackened skeleton collection.  
He or someone like him had fitted me with a pair of those old fashioned iron handcuffs and some ineffective leg chains. I'd been shoved into one of those old Western style jails that looked like a barn. My boots sat buried under a foot of straw.  
I checked my restraints, figuring their barbaric design would make for easy escape, but they proved to be sufficient to keep an idiot like me stuck where I was. The chains were nailed to a wooden plaque attached to a stone wall. There was no way to pry them off.  
My cuffs were simple clamps closed with a padlock, but somehow they had screwed something through them so that it fit around my wrists tight enough to nearly cut off the circulation. I had nothing to pick the lock with, and the nails on the plank resembled railroad spikes. So I was screwed.  
The bars on my cell overlooked a wall. A lantern, hanging on an iron ring, was a fire hazard with all the straw. I had a bucket to pee in, and the rear window overlooked...well, I had never been to D.C., so I had no idea. The buildings across the...dirt road were shops, so they told me nothing, except that there was a high demand for candles and horseshoes. It was a village of people dressed like pioneers. That's all I knew.  
My bed was a slab on a chain with hay and blankets on it.  
I could see Eve through the bars of the cell next to me. They'd put clothes on her. Something that looked like a nun's habit. Bastards.  
Seriously, it wasn't a bad look.  
Of course they had chained her up just like me.  
I didn't see Riversong anywhere. Maybe she got smart and stayed inside the...time traveling clothes closet.  
A half shaved man in a coat and knickerbockers sat guard over my cell, staring at me like I were a goat with three heads.  
I waved to him. "Hi."  
He didn't reply.  
"Um, can I speak to Benjamin Franklin?"  
He snorted. "You trying to kill him too?"  
I raised my manacles. "How can I kill anyone with this on?"  
He shrugged. "I'm sure you'll find a way."  
"Then you don't know me very well," I said. "I can't fight my way out of a paper bag."  
He nodded in the direction of Eve's cell. "Your friend just killed a guard with her legs."  
I swallowed. She'd made the situation worse.  
"Well it's good you put us in separate cells," I said. "That could have been me!"  
He chuckled at that.  
"Seriously, I would have never gone to the Oval Office to begin with if she hadn't dragged me by the hair." Her actions were indefensible. I figured it best to throw her under the bus.  
The man gave me a blank look. "What's an Oval Office?"  
"Uh," I stammered. "It's in the White House?"  
He looked like he'd never heard of that either.  
"It's the center of the U.S. Government."  
He laughed. "Do you think you're in Virginia or something?"  
"I'm not in Virginia."  
"No sir."  
An awkward silence followed.  
"Did I...did she really kill George Washington?"  
He scowled. "What do you think?"  
Another awkward silence.  
"So where am I?"  
"In a jail," he joked. And that's all the information I got.  
"See? I didn't even know where I was going. She just drags me over there against my will and kills the president."  
"You won't have to worry about her pulling your hair any longer," the man said. "You're going to the gallows at dawn."  
"Gallows!" I protested. "I'm an American citizen! I have a constitutional right to to trial by a jury of peers and a state appointed defense attorney!"  
I never thought I'd need that bit of information. It's usually something I take for granted. It seemed I would be using every bit of my high school and college American history education. "A suspect shall be presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law!" I pieced that last one together from what I heard on COPS.  
The man stared at me for a long time before saying, "Mister, that's some pretty good bullshit. Where did you say you were from?"  
"Missouri."  
"Funny, with that accent, I took you for a Bostonian."  
"Speaking of which," I said. "Have they had the Tea Party yet?"  
He laughed. "Now we're having tea, are we?"  
"Um...I heard...about...some guys dressing up like Indians and throwing tea into Boston harbor to protest taxes."  
The man's eyes narrowed. "What do you know."  
That hadn't been a very good idea, I guessed. I didn't know the man's political affiliations. Having absolutely no idea what year it was didn't help matters.  
"Um, not too much more than that," I said. "Something about the Sons of Liberty demanding no taxation without representation, I guess."  
His eyes darted back and forth. "Shut your trap! The walls have ears!" He gave my wife a sideways glance, indicating, perhaps, that he trusted me now. He leaned close to the bars. "Who do you have running the operation?"  
I burst out laughing. "Got me! I don't know. I'm not in charge."  
"Then who is?" he hissed.  
For some reason, I thought Washington was part of it, which wouldn't have worked in my favor, even if I hadn't been completely wrong. "Uh...I dunno...I just heard about it." And then I stumbled over a clever ploy. "...But I think it had something to do with Benjamin Franklin."  
He paused and stared at me for a long time, then said, "Well, you are chained to the wall. I guess you can't do much to him if he stays outside the bars."  
Then the guard slowly strolled out of the jail.  
When he had disappeared, I found something shiny hitting me in the head.  
I fished through the hay nearby and saw it was the president's Masonic ring.  
I stared at Eve in disbelief. "I thought this was in my pocket."  
"It was," she grinned. "I stole it from the guard that frisked you."  
"The one you killed?" I gawked at her. "How did they not notice you pocketing it?"  
"I didn't use my hands," she smirked. "While I was grabbing the keys, I just flicked it away and...kinda sat on it."  
It had been inside her. I almost dropped the ring, but I had already done worse than touch the stuff. I wiped it off, staring at the inscription. Something about "united we stand." I put it back in my pocket.  
"Okay, where's the keys?"  
"They took them back," she shrugged. "There were a lot of guards."  
"Wait. You can unscrew bolts with your hands. Get us out of here."  
Eve shook her head. "I can't. They've placed a collar around my neck that suppresses Dalek abilities. The man who bears the likeness of your currency seems to have studied our technology." She frowned at me. "Do you love me?"  
I swallowed. This wasn't something I wanted to discuss with a woman who just killed the president. I gazed at her for a long time.  
Despite everything, though, I couldn't honestly say I didn't love her.  
"Yes," I stammered.  
"Then why are you trying to get me executed?"  
I sighed. "Baby, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. You've made yourself an enemy of freedom. I don't trust you anymore." I cleared my throat. "But if I get a fair trial, I'll be sure to give you one. Hopefully we'll be able to get it down to a life sentence."  
A few minutes later, I see the dumpy old man waddling in.  
"Mr. Franklin!" I cried.  
"Who are you!" the man growled.  
"An enemy of the crown." It was my best bluff. "Mr. Franklin, it's an honor to actually meet you. The post office, the almanac, that stunt you did with the kite in the thunderstorm, the invention of the eyeglasses, and most importantly, the signing of the Constitution."  
The founding father scowled at me. "Are you a spy?"  
I shrugged. "Double agent." I thought it a nice bluff. "I tried to stop the assassination."  
He frowned, looking like he didn't believe me. "How do you know about the Constitution?"  
"Um...I'm a spy?" I paused. "Did you not write it yet?"  
He slowly shook his head.  
"I hope you do. It's really important."  
The guy still looked uneasy.  
"I'm a Freemason," I lied. "In fact, when I saw the woman in the next cell killing him, I took the ring so it wouldn't fall into the wrong hands." And I held it out to him. "Please, give it back to the brotherhood."  
His features became more drawn. "I've never seen you at any of the meetings."  
"I'm with the Missouri chapter." I threw the ring to him.  
He ended up picking it up from the ground. "When I meant I never saw you at any of the meetings, I meant the national ones, too."  
I shrugged. "Couldn't make it. Last year...my horse got sick. It's always something."  
It seemed that excuse actually worked.  
"I would like a state appointed legal representative, as I can't afford my own, a jury of peers, and to not be counted guilty of this most heinous crime without a fair trial."  
The man stared at me with absolute surprise for a few minutes, then I saw him take out a little book, scribbling something down with a little lump of graphite.  
"Remarkable!" he laughed. "Truly remarkable! It's like you read my thoughts! Or Jefferson's! How long have you been in law school?"  
"I...awhile." I took a deep breath. "Is there any way we can at least change this hanging sentence to life without parole or something? I find the punishment...cruel and unusual, especially considering the fact I didn't even touch the president...or conspire to his death."  
He steepled his fingers together. Instead of answering my question, he said, "I've heard that you have an unique idea on how to tell the British we're fed up with their unreasonable tax levies."  
I paused. "What year is it?"  
"1772. Why?"  
"Do you believe in time travel?"  
He frowned at my space suit. "I've seen enough things to make me wonder if there were such a thing, or beings beyond the stars. Like the Rolling Ironsides, for example. Now, about that...what did you call it? Tea...party?"  
And so I described the old story they taught me in grade school. It took him awhile for him to process it. I hadn't given him that much information because I couldn't remember it.  
At last, the man gave me a broad one hundred dollar smile and said, "Double agent, I'm willing to give you a reprieve on behalf of the Order, on one condition. You must go to Boston Harbor and carry out this plan at once."  
Oh no.


	13. Chapter 13: Madame Vastra

Benjamin Franklin had just assigned me the duty of dumping the tea into Boston harbor. The logistics of the whole thing made me uneasy. I didn't know what year the party took place, or where exactly to find the tea, or what kind of guards stood watch over said tea. I didn't even know what quantity of tea would be sufficient to make history. I had a suspicion that Old Ben was planning to let the redcoats take care of my execution. My first impulse was to pretend to do the job long enough to escape back to the TARDIS, then get the hell out of there.  
When Mr. Franklin opened the cell, I figured I could run for it, but Eve had told me there were lots of guards, so instead asked Mr. Penny Saved if he could promise life in prison for my wife instead of execution.  
He shocked me by opening her cell and letting her out.  
"Are you sure that's a good idea?" I said. "The American people probably want to see the president's killer face justice. Unless you throw some poor slob in here as a scapegoat..."  
"She would never receive a fair trial, as she has no peers of her kind. Moreover, she claims to be your wife. From what I can gather from the circumstantial evidence, it was the Rolling Ironside that killed him, and you were attempting to stop it. You are both innocent until proven guilty, as you suggest."  
I could have damned Eve with a more detailed explanation, but I realized I didn't have a chance against a redcoat without her.  
"Is the American public going to believe the story about the...ironsides?"  
"They should. They've slaughtered everyone in Richmond."  
I sighed. It seemed I was up to my asshole in proverbial alligators.  
"Richmond? So where am I?" I asked.  
"Rhode Island, a few miles outside of Providence."  
I fail at geography. Not wanting to look like a totally ignorant spy, I didn't ask for a map or an explanation. I just nodded my head.  
"I'm sending you to meet with with Mr. Revere in Boston. If you need help finding him, inquire at the local Lodge." And he gives Washington's ring back to me.  
I would have asked where the friggin' lodge was located, but I figured if I did that, I'd end back up in the cell and maybe get a rope necklace with the deal.  
"How long will this take?" I asked.  
"Oh?" he paused. "It's a sixty mile journey. Probably a couple days, at least, if you leave now. I'll show you to the cab," he said.  
Sixty miles in a cab, I thought. I was picturing a yellow taxi, though seriously doubting I'd get one. I wondered about this as I followed him out.  
The prison was larger than I imagined, and it was convoluted as a hospital. I wondered if the prison actually stood in modern Rhode Island or if it burned down or got created by all the Dalek things, but it seemed I hadn't watched COPS enough to figure even that one out.  
Here and there, rough cowboy types glowered in their cells, but the ones that scared me the most looked clean cut and dressed like country doctors and bankers. They jeered and yelled and shouted accusations, some spat on me.  
We checked out with a guard at a desk somewhere at the end (a guard with a compass ring, no less), and then Ben was chatting with a man in a suit next to a horse and buggy.  
I looked around, but couldn't find anything to help me identify this place.  
He motioned me over. "Hurry. Get in."  
"That's the cab?" I asked.  
"What were you expecting?" He opened the door and let me in.  
Before I climbed the short steps inside the door, I caught a flash of a gold Freemasonry ring on the driver's hand.  
I seated myself on a cushioned bench, silently staring at the nun seating herself across from me.  
When the door closed and the vehicle started rocking and clopping and banging around, I spoke.  
"Please tell me Dalek 48 killed the president on his own."  
She looked down. "I didn't fire the laser."  
"Did you bring the TARDIS here?"  
"No."  
"You just told them to attack while I slept."  
She flushed red. "No. I...I just got up, and, I kind of wanted to see what the man looked like, and what all the trouble was about, so I told the Dalek it was okay to go there. The man...got upset, and scared...and..." She frowned. "Dalek 48 took over from there."  
There wasn't much for me to say to that.  
We bumped along in silence for a long time. I don't know how many miles we rode, exactly. Outside the window, it looked like a big production of SantaCaliGon Days. I think I caught sight of a Sears and JcPenny's, but they had western facades and didn't have much of a selection, from what I could see from the dirty windows. I don't know if those were even related to the famous guys.  
Our ride suddenly stopped, and we got out.  
It wasn't the harbor. Instead, I found myself standing out on a road in the middle of a row of plantations. It looked like corn and tobacco, maybe, some wheat here and there, and black people were toiling away among the plants, supervised by some unpleasant looking types with whips.  
I remembered that Washington owned slaves, so I wasn't overly surprised. I briefly considered a little underground railroading, but I didn't want to mess up history more, and I didn't relish seeing the inside of that jail again.  
I did the next best thing and just gave one of the workers a friendly wave. He laughed and pointed at me, and he and his buddies had a good laugh about my spacesuit, I guess.  
Well, until the slave master, who hadn't been looking at me, cracked the whip down on them. I gave them an apologetic shrug.  
I suddenly saw a dappled mare and a wooden cart full of hay clopping up to me.  
The driver was a short, squatty man with no neck and an impossibly dark tan. He looked silly in his coat and knickerbockers. His stretched out facial features seemed to squash together as he stared at me.  
Next to him stood a woman in a black dress, a black hat, and a black veil. It was a little too hot for that outfit, but she didn't seem to care.  
"Uh hi!" I said. "Are you taking me to Boston?"  
"You're a year early to the party," the guy with the potato shaped head growled. "Want to throw some spices and silks into the harbor?"  
I felt like I had just been slapped in the face. "What?"  
"The Destruction of the Tea in Boston," the guy said. "You're early. It's in December."  
"Next year," the woman chimed in. "But you can still take out the Dartmouth a month before that."  
"Preferably with explosives! Can you imagine hot tea in the harbor! Oh, and the dead redcoats! Glorious!"  
"Any more `glorious' than a Dalek blowing away the first president of the United States?"  
"Ah," he frowned. "Probably not."  
I sat down on a hay bale and sighed. "Dammit!" I don't want to sit around this place for a whole year!"  
"Who says you have to?"  
"What, you got a time machine or something?"  
"Perhaps," said the veiled woman. "What happened to yours? Nice outfit, by the way. Very Skaro."  
"You stick out like a sore thumb!"  
"The TARDIS is in the Oval Office with the dead president," I sighed. "And my...daughter is in there. More's the trouble, because I just told Ben Franklin I'd dump the tea."  
"I always thought the Doctor would have better disguises in there."  
"Oh. The phone booth. The Daleks took that one. I've got the older model." I shook my head. "And that's probably why Richmond got obliterated." I did a double take. "Why do you know the Doctor?"  
The woman pulled back her veil, and I saw a green reptile face peering back at me. "We're old friends."  
Considering what I had experienced with dinosaurs, I wasn't ready for it. I jumped back in surprise, falling off the hay bale. My nun leapt to my side to protect me.  
The reptile woman laughed.  
"Old habits die hard," Eve chuckled.  
I groaned. "You made a pun!"  
"See?" she laughed. "The human part of me is still here."  
Since I knew I wasn't in danger of being eaten, at least I assumed, I crept back up, staring at her more closely.  
The green woman had horns, but her teeth looked human, and her facial features were at least eye pleasing. "Hey neat!" I said.  
My wife took this opportunity to remove the headpiece of her outfit.  
The woman smiled. "It's a shame to hear about the Doctor."  
"Did you find if he was truly dead or not?"  
"Sadly, he is. We checked."  
"Where's the body?"  
"The Ood took it from that primitive excuse for a hospital."  
"And what are the Ood?"  
She shrugged. "They have tentacles on their faces, and carry around orbs."  
I knew exactly what she was describing, and it scared me. "Shit! Those things are real?"  
"I'm real, aren't I?" The woman put her veil back on.  
"Those things have been stalking me. They were everywhere. They even watched me having-" Accidental overshare. I stopped myself. "Everything." I frowned. "Not sure why they weren't looking at the Dalek killing the president."  
"Difficult to say," said the woman. "Dear, could you put your habit back on? There are people watching."  
I sighed, staring glumly at a hay bale.  
"Problem?"  
"I have to spend an entire year in this place just so I can have access to the TARDIS and get everyone out of here."  
"Does your...daughter know how to operate the TARDIS?"  
"Yeah?"  
"Does she know where you're going?"  
"No. I assume she thinks I'm going to Boston harbor. At least I hope. Ben should tell her all about it if she ever meets him."  
"Very well, then!"  
The big man hopped into a seat next to the woman.  
"Who are you?" I asked.  
"I'm Madame Vastra," said the woman. "And he's Strax."  
Strax snapped the whip, and the wagon rumbled down the road.  
I watched lizard lady pulls something out of her purse, sticking it under her veil.  
"Jenny, the TARDIS is in General Washington's secret cabin. Our friend's daughter is inside. Tell her to meet us at Boston Harbor. Old Griffin's Wharf." she paused. "Yes, I know. They're not actually going to dump the tea." Another pause. "It's a crime scene. We can't just walk in there. We were hoping that you could check and see if the girl is still there." After listening a bit more, she turned to me and said, "What's your daughter's name?"  
"Riversong," I said.  
That seemed to startle her. "*The* Riversong?"  
I shrugged. "I...don't think the name is very common, but I could be wrong?"  
"Change of plans," she said into the phone or whatever it was. "It's R.S. Just leave a message with the coordinates I'm sending. She'll know what to do." And she put the device away. "I thought Riversong had other parents."  
"She does," I said. "I adopted her because they're apparently dead."  
"And you didn't let that stop you." I could see a smirk beneath the veil. "Brave boy."  
"He's a man," said Eve.  
The reptile woman's eyes rolled behind the veil.  
"I still think you're putting too much confidence in a child."  
The woman chuckled. "You make it sound like she were a helpless little girl."  
I stared at her. "She's not?" I stammered. "I mean, she's clever, I'll give you that, but..."  
"She's brilliant. She'll find us."  
"What other brilliant things has she done?" I asked.  
And so she told me a few stories about how she helped the Doctor save the universe.  
"One problem with that," I told her. "It sounds like everything you've described involves her being an adult when she's doing those things."  
"She's very precocious," Madame Vastra shrugged.  
"I hope so."  
We rode on.  
"Is there any way we can go back in time and stop Washington from getting shot?"  
"We certainly need to try. The universe is completely out of balance. London is experiencing a negative butterfly effect from the results of the president's death. In fact, we have heard messages from the future telling us that the Doctor dies a lot earlier than he's supposed to if nothing is done."  
"Will you help me do it?"  
She sighed. "I guess we don't have a choice, do we?"  
"Some things are better left to the pros!" Strax muttered.  
Vastra turned back around.  
My wife took this opportunity to snuggle up to me and give me kisses. I really wasn't into the whole sexy nun shtick, so I pushed her aside and said, "Not now." Maybe not ever, I thought.  
We didn't ride all the way to Boston on a hay wagon. About a mile down the road, we turned onto someone's farm property and parked in front of a barn.  
"What's this place?" I asked.  
"It belongs to a friend of the Sons of Liberty." The big guy took the horses into a pen, pumped some well water for them to drink, then threw the barn doors open.  
"What, are we going to hide in there?"  
He replied by pushing something on his wrist.  
A second later, I saw a giant green UFO occupying most of the floor space.  
A hatch opened, and he wordlessly led us all inside.  
The layout reminded me oddly of the inside of the bottle on I Dream of Jeannie. The colors were blue and green, but the main room was basically a table inside a ring of couch seats. There were a couple hatchways leading out, one apparently the cockpit, but that was it.  
We took our seats, and the big guy stomped up front to pilot, I suppose, because a few minutes later, everything vibrated and hummed.  
Madame Vastra removed her veil and touched the table. A map appeared in the air.  
"So where's the baked beans and cream pies?" I joked.  
"Perhaps later," she said it with a complete lack of mirth. She pointed a green claw at a spot near the harbor, along a wharf. "If Jenny has left her message as planned, Riversong should be waiting for us here."  
She pushed another spot on the table, and images of the world outside appeared on the walls. I saw trees rushing past, then old style houses, and finally boats.  
We parked between a couple freighters, which was kind of surreal because we had to wait until no one was looking and march down a ramp attached to an invisible ship to the dock.  
We quickly marched across the wharf, looking around.  
I'd never seen giant wooden ships with sails except in a movie theater. The thing were as tall as buildings, and they reminded me of pictures I've seen of the Mayflower, or the wealthy merchant ships you see getting robbed in pirate movies.  
We stood along sort of a boardwalk lined with rows of old world shops of a decidedly nautical theme. The fish market was quite extensive.  
Lucky for us, our parking spot stood across from a windowless portion of a tavern. As we strolled up and down the planks, staring at the various wares, our pilot stopped in at the pub.  
I took a glance inside the place and found a guy that looked like a beer label. I figured the man's name was Sam. I almost fell over laughing when he held out a tankard in my direction.  
If I had known any better, I would have talked to him about the tea, but such is the public school education.  
I left Strax at the bar, wandering out. I didn't want to wait until next December anyway.  
Hearing a high pitched scream, I turned and saw a redcoat dragging a little kicking and screaming figure to the top of a boarding ramp. They disappeared to somewhere above decks.  
"Riversong!" I yelled.  
Maybe she wasn't so brilliant, after all.


	14. Chapter 14: Ninja Nun 2

It's not every day that a redcoat kidnaps your daughter.  
When I first heard the scream and saw Riversong being taken away, I entertained thoughts of negotiating with the kidnapper, but the brutality of the abduction led me to believe that the man was not to be trusted.  
I crept up the boarding ramp carefully, not wanting to draw unwanted attention, though it was kind of a moot point considering my spacesuit.  
Someone had left a piece of iron on the planks, so I stuck it through the belt-like thing around my waist, hoping that my steady diet of kung fu movies, my orange belt in karate and the pitiful one shot powder weapons of the era would put me at an advantage.  
My wife stealthily crept up alongside me, looking like she were trying out for a movie called Karate Nun.  
Our mysterious veiled companion watched us from the wharf, apparently a bit nervous about what we were doing, or tearing her dress, or both. Her friend, Mr. Potato Head, (Strax) was still in the pub, it seemed, so me and the nun went up by ourselves.  
As we neared the plank leading onboard, I noticed it offered a direct line of sight to the enemy, so I searched around until I found some overhanging ropes.  
Lucky for me, transcontinental sailors happen to eat a lot of fish, so they had a net. It wasn't in a convenient place, but it was there, hanging off the side about two yards away from the plank. With a semi running start, I could clamber up the ropes and sneak over the port side wall...or fall ten stories, hit my head on a board, and fall unconscious into the salt water. No pressure.  
I took a chance and jumped.  
I caught the rope, but only with my index finger. I let out an agonized scream, hurriedly slapping the fingers of my other hand through the net to keep from falling. As I dragged myself upwards, I regretted my neglect of the exercise of pull-ups.  
Immediately, I saw men in tunics leaning over the side, yelling and pointing at me. A couple of them brought out muskets.  
Fortunately for me, but not for history, the nun had stolen some knives and cutlery from somewhere, and my would be assassins fell abovedecks, firing their black powder weapons in wild directions as they were impaled through the throat or other vital organs with knives and forks.  
Or so I thought.  
As I pulled myself up the netting, agonizing over my sprained finger every time my left touched the ropes, I heard something thudding and someone cursing.  
When I neared the top, I was met by a horrible bearded face.  
The bloody marks around his shoulders showed him to be mostly unharmed by Ninja Sister's two tined suriken attack.  
Afraid that he'd crush my hands and dump me into Head Trauma Land, I whipped out the piece of iron and smacked him across the head.  
Unlike how it shows in the movies, my first strike just really pissed him off and made him swear a lot.  
I quickly shoved myself onboard, raising the bar again in hopes of knocking him out.  
He instead caught it on a down swing and wrenched it out of my hands, brandishing it in a threatening manner.  
My karate experience is rusty, but I still remember the disastrous effects of not wearing a protective cup while sparring. I threw a thrust kick to that sensitive area and ran like hell.  
If I had been smarter, I would have grabbed the piece of metal before running, but I did find a harpoon. I really didn't relish the idea of murdering someone in cold blood with it, but I figured I could at least what a guy with it a few times.  
The problem was, I had focused all my attention to the guy with the iron bar. I suddenly backed into a tall muscular figure standing in a doorway, and a leaner grizzled person punched me in the head.  
Disoriented, I swung the harpoon like a baseball bat, knocking the tall guy back, then I unthinkingly shoved the harpoon into the other guy's stomach.  
I'm not a barbarian, so I didn't pull the harpoon back out. I just left it in there as I checked on the guy in the doorway.  
The next moment, I feel something heavy slamming against the back of my skull, and I'm pitching overboard.


End file.
